Better Living through Reality TV

Better Living
through Reality TV

Television and
Post-welfare Citizenship
Laurie Ouellette and James Hay

Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Introduction 1
1 Charity TV: Privatizing Care, Mobilizing Compassion 32
2 TV Interventions: Personal Responsibility and Techniques of the Self 63
3 Makeover TV: Labors of Reinvention 99
4 TV and the Self-Defensive Citizen 134
5 TV's Constitutions of Citizenship 170
6 Playing TV's Democracy Game 203
Notes 225
Index 245

Illustrations
0.1 Todd TV 5
1.1 Queen for a Day 33
1.2 Extreme Makeover: Home Edition 49
1.3 Three Wishes 57
2.1 Brat Camp 69
2.2 Honey We're Killing the Kids 89
2.3 Supernanny 94
3.1 What Not to Wear 111
3.2 America's Next Top Model 128
j 4.1 Suze Orman 148
4.2 It Takes a Thief 161
5.1 Survivor and The Apprentice 189
5.2 Wife Swap 194
5.3 Black/White 198
6.1 American Idol 214

Introduction
In 2004, TV viewers were enlisted to help guide and shape a human subject named Todd. Under the
provocative mantra "Build a Better Todd," they watched video footage of the young man's daily life
and voted on the recommendations of professional experts brought in to improve his image, attitude,
social life, finances, and career trajectory. After considering the suggestions and strategies for Todd's
selfbetterment presented during each episode's Todd Town Hall segment, viewers telephoned or
texted their decision to the FX cable network. As part of his television "contract with America," the
star of the reality program agreed to abide by the results of the viewer poll and transform his life
accordingly. Over the course of the season, he was ordered to upgrade his wardrobe, pursue a new
line of work, go on arranged dates, and undergo psychotherapy.
Todd TV adopted voting procedures to stage Todd's TV life as the outcome of a democratic process as the government of an individual's conduct and choices by TV viewers and by Todd. Todd was
required to temporarily give up his free will, bending to the wishes of the viewing public, and his
lack of agency in the situations that ensued was a source of amusement. However, the point of the
experiment was to cultivate Todd's ability to manage his own life, and steer his own fate by
implementing the training provided by the TV program. In the parlance of political philosophy, Todd
was being transformed into the sort of citizen who can be ruled through freedom, not control, and his
reward for cooperating with the exercise (however humiliating it may have been) was also presented
as his democratic duty to pursue happiness, self-fulfillment, and success. TV viewers were ostensibly
empowered to help steer Todd's metamorphosis, but they were also invited to envision their own
lives as a similar process of strategic decision-making and self-improvement. In this respect, Todd
TV illustrates reality TV's preoccupation with "self work," and a reasoning about the nature and
practice of governing in the current political epoch.
Todd TV operates at the intersection of two phenomena - the reinvention of television and the
reinvention of government - addressed by this book. The program is part of the explosion of popular
reality TV that began in the mid-1990s, and continues to this day. While reality TV has existed since
the earliest days of the medium, only in the past decade has it become a major force in TV culture,
with a vast array of reality-based entertainment and lifestyle programming taking hold during
primetime and daytime hours, on network and specialized cable channels. Better Living through
Reality TV situates the surge of popular nonfiction on television within strategies of liberal
governance. We examine reality TV's relationship to ideals of "governing at a distance" and consider
how reality TV simultaneously diffuses and amplifies the government of everyday life, utilizing the
cultural power of television (and its convergence with books, magazines, the web, and mobile media)
to assess and guide the ethics, behaviors, aspirations, and routines of ordinary people. At a time when
privatization, personal responsibility, and consumer choice are promoted as the best way to govern
liberal capitalist democracies, reality TV shows us how to conduct and "empower" ourselves as
enterprising citizens. We consider the reasons for this, and explore the possibilities for agency it
opens up and closes down.
The many subgenres of popular reality TV (dating shows, makeovers, job competitions, gamedocs,

reality soaps, interventions, lifestyle demonstrations) share a preoccupation with testing, judging,
advising, and rewarding the conduct of "real" people in their capacities as contestants, workers,
housemates, family members, homeowners, romantic partners, patients, and consumers. In the
process, reality TV circulates informal "guidelines for living" that we are all (at times) called upon to
learn from and follow. These are not abstract ideologies imposed from above, but highly dispersed
and practical techniques for reflecting on, managing, and improving the multiple dimensions of our
personal lives with the resources available to us. Reality TV has become one of these resources. In a
given week, we can learn how to succeed at work (The Apprentice, America's Next Top Model,
Project Runway), how to win a desirable mate (The Bachelor/Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire), how to
be stylish (What Not to Wear), sophisticated (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) and personable (Beauty
and the Geek), how to survive natural and manmade challenges (Survivor, Big Brother), how to
nourish our health and psyche (Honey We're Killing the Kids, Starting Over), how to put our personal
finances in order (Suze Orman, Mad Money with Jim Cramer), how to enhance an ordinary house or
car (Trading Spaces, Pimp My Ride), how to transform our bodies (Extreme Makeover, The Swan,
the Fitness Channel), how to maximize sexual performance and intimacy (Sex Inspectors, Berman and
Berman), how to manage our families and domestic lives (Supernanny, Wife Swap, the Food
Network), how to prepare for dangers and emergencies (Storm Stories, It Takes a Thief What Should
You Do?), and even how to restore blighted cityscapes (Town Haul).
Reality TV is educational in this respect - but not in the same way as formalized attempts to harness
television as a cultural technology capable of disseminating the "best that has been thought and said."
Conceptualized as an extension of the public university, the earliest experiments in "education by
television" were abstract, didactic, unadorned, and dominated by academics, journalists, and other
bona fide intellectual authorities. This is not surprising, for the citizens these programs wished to
"empower" were conceived as a gullible mass that needed guidance in the liberal arts to participate
in the rituals of public democracy. Today's popular reality TV addresses the viewer differently. The
citizen is now conceived as an individual whose most pressing obligation to society is to empower
her or himself privately. TV assists by acting as a visible component of a dispersed network of
supporting technologies geared to self-help and self-actualization. Ordinary people are now
welcomed on screen, providing subject matter, "case studies," points of identification, and sources of
disobedience and conflict. Experts are more apt to characterize themselves as "self-made" authorities
trading in applied forms of business, lifestyle, and therapeutic knowledge. While there is no solitary
explanation for this, the concrete skills, interpersonal advice, problem-solving techniques, step-bystep demonstrations, intimate feedback, motivational support mechanisms, and suggestions for
everyday application offered by reality TV are undoubtedly more useful to strategies of governing
through self and lifestyle than educational programs of the past. Reality TV's informal curriculum is
also more profitable - not only because it combines learning with the pleasures of popular culture and
the practicalities of everyday life, but because in a political climate that demands self-enterprise, the
"civic" training it provides has become a desirable commodity.
Chronicling the details and challenges of lifestyles and the outcomes of ordinary people's choices and
behavior, reality TV invests the minutiae of everyday life with dramatic importance. Personal advice
and instruction are part of the mix, but they are infused with, and tempered by, elements of voyeurism,

suspense, humor, and emotional intensity. Tellingly, many reality programs owe less to the illustrated
lecture than to the converging conventions of the televised game and the staged experiment. Rarely
didactic and never intentionally dull, reality games connect the process of learning and mastering "the
rules" of individual and group governance to pleasures of play and suspense. Staged experiments
position television as a dramatic "civic laboratory" for testing the capacities - and limits - of human
subjects conceived as the agents of their uncertain destinies. Both sets of conventions informed the
premise of Todd TV which, like many reality shows, was billed as compelling entertainment, not as a
formal tutorial in governing. We shouldn't let this prevent us from exploring reality TV's relevance to
diffuse, and often profoundly contradictory mechanisms of contemporary rule. Reality TV's capacity
to insert guidelines for living into the nooks and crannies of everyday life is connected in complex but
important ways to what formal policymakers like to call the "reinvention of government." By aligning
TV viewers with a proliferating supply of techniques for shaping and guiding themselves and their
private associations with others, reality TV has become the quintessential technology of advanced or
"neo" liberal citizenship.
Todd TV does not draw unequivocal conclusions about how Todd should live his life, but it does
combine advice, rules, demonstrations, games, experiments, and tests to "empower" him (and his
audience) through the management of conduct and behavior. This is precisely how popular reality TV
governs. As the State entrusts private entities (including TV) to operate as social service providers,
conflict mediators, and support networks, popular reality TV does more than entertain - it becomes a
resource for inventing, managing, caring for, and protecting ourselves as citizens. Such is the case
with television's highprofile efforts to actively intervene in the lives of needy individuals. It is a sign
of the times that, in the absence of public welfare programs, hundreds of thousands of people now
apply directly to reality TV programs for housing, affordable healthcare, and other forms of
assistance. The "do-good" trend illustrated by Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Three Wishes,
Miracle Workers, and similar charity programs requires us to move beyond political economic and
representational analysis, to consider how TV mobilizes and coordinates private resources (money,
volunteerism, skills/expertise) in order to remedy personal hardships. Within the context of the
reinvention of government, TV's concern with not only documenting, but with facilitating the care of
needy and "at-risk" citizens through cultural commerce, philanthropy, and TV-viewer volunteerism is
also a way of enacting methods of social service provision that do not involve "entitlements" and
models of civic participation that do not "depend" on the Welfare State. Of course, as we will
demonstrate in Chapter 1, television assists only the most "deserving" cases of need, as determined by
casting departments whose assessment of hardship is informed not only by the logic of welfare
reform, but by the dramatic conventions and formulas of reality TV.

Illustration 0. 1 Todd follows a "to-do" list devised by experts and viewers on Todd TV (Endemol
Entertainment USA and Lock & Key Productions for FX, 2004)
The life interventions that have become a staple of reality TV also coordinate resources for
diagnosing problems and transforming "needy" individuals into functioning citizens. Relying on
professional coaches, motivators, and lifestyle experts, these programs advance liberal strategies of
"governing at a distance" by linking social work as a residual form of public welfare to governing
technologies of self-help and do-it-yourself entrepreneurialism. Some, like Dr. Phil and the reality
soap Startiq,q Over, draw from corporate management techniques, among other resources, to help
women "empower" themselves through self-governed behavioral regimens. Other, more specialized,
TV interventions use a combination of disciplinary and self-help strategies to enable individuals to
"help themselves" overcome alcoholism and drug abuse (Intervention), juvenile delinquency (Brat
Camp), shopping addictions (Clean House), and poor eating habits (Honey We're Killiig the Kids),
among other problems. Like professionalized social work, many TV interventions are guided by an
unstated impetus to bring less educated, lower-income populations up to upper-middle-class
standards. However, reality TV also brings managerial approaches to the "proper" care of the self to
an array of middle-class lifestyle dilemmas, from spoiled children (Supernanuy, Nanny 911) to

household clutter (Mission: Organization; neat). As we will show in Chapter 2, both crisis
interventions and lifestyle programs enact an entrepreneurial ethic of self-care, thus linking the TV
intervention to policy trends from welfare-to-work mandates to public-sector downsizing. This is not
a matter of TV programs "misrepresenting" welfare reform or having an ideological "effect" on
gullible viewers. It is about television becoming more useful to a rationality of governing that
emphasizes self-empowerment as a condition of citizenship. Like other strands of reality TV,
interventions work by coordinating and regularizing private resources and support networks for living
an enterprising life. While television has made itself integral to this project, it is still only one
component of a relay of cultural technologies that may also involve related web sites, tie-in
merchandise, books, self-help manuals, and podcasts.
Makeover TV is another example of contemporary television offering itself as an indispensable
resource for enterprising citizenship. As the sense of social and financial security promised by an
expanding educational system, "jobs for life," and guaranteed pensions cones to an end, the self
becomes more important as a flexible commodity to be molded, packaged, managed, reinvented, and
sold. From Extreme Makeover to What Not to Wear, the burgeoning makeover genre speaks to this
shift and proposes an "empowering" solution by way of refashioning one's looks, style, and
personality. This isn't offered only or even primarily to the human "targets" of television's sensational
overhauls, for the applied art and science of self-presentation is something we are all increasingly
expected to draw from, to various degrees. In assisting in this endeavor, television's makeover
ventures build upon an existing training regime that has historically offered women techniques to
bolster their value in the heterosexual dating market. They extend this rationality to other populations,
including men, and other spheres of sociality, including the workplace. The assumption that we must
all maximize our greatest asset - ourselves - has accelerated alongside such trends as labor
outsourcing, branding, lifelong education as a substitute for job security, and corporate reinvention. In
this uncertain context, we argue in Chapter 3, the makeover is offered a lifestyle game whose rules
can be learned and applied. Competitions like America's Next Top Model and I Want to Be a Hilton
take this a step further by bringing competition into the mix and documenting the emotional trauma and
resentment of those contestants who fail to assemble themselves as flexible and enterprising
commodities.
Other strands of reality TV advance a reasoning about governing by teaching individuals to take
responsibility for a range of lurking risks, from bankruptcy to weather emergencies. Whether or not
society has become riskier - and many would dispute this assumption - we are now offered a whole
barrage of technical resources for managing our own personal, physical, household, and "homeland"
security. Reality TV is one of these resources, we argue in Chapter 4. Some ventures, like Arnerica's
Most Wanted and It Takes a T{lief, empower the white upper-middle class to protect itself and its
property. Others, like personal finance guru Suze Orman's TV show and Bloomberg TV, offer
guidelines for responsible money management, whether that means climbing out of debt in a recessive
economy, or investing soundly for retirement in the age of Enron. This preoccupation with risk as an
individual problem dovetails with the ethic of "personal responsibility" in that all citizens are
expected to avert disaster through rational planning. The "securitization" of daily life is an important
dimension of this duty, one that has only heightened with public attention to terrorism and other

national security issues.

Reality TV's games of "group governance" are another site where television intersects with processes
of rule. Focusing on the places - neighborhood, household, workplace - where we are expected to
participate in and abide by rules and procedures of private membership, programs like Wife Swap
and The Real World insert themselves into these processes of private governance. TV becomes a
technology for constructing the rules or "constitutions" of everyday life. The conventions of these
programs require individuals to work on themselves in the interest of the group - which can involve
cooperating with others, becoming more tolerant, and adjusting behavior and expectations. Instead of
assessing these shows on the basis of their representational accuracy or progressiveness, Chapters 5
and 6 consider them technical resources for enacting government in the spaces where most of us live
and negotiate citizenship. TV's experiments in private governing have emerged in the context of the
State's retreat from formalized affirmative action, antidiscrimination, and conflict resolution programs
- and yet, they are also the place where reality TV most overlaps with democratic processes, as was
the case in Welcome to the Nei~hborhood, a program that was pulled by ABC when protesters
claimed it violated federal housing policy. Collectively these chapters ask what is involved (and
complicated) about imagining a path to political reform through the current intersection of TV, media,
and government.
Placing TV in an Analytic of Government
As government becomes more privatized and dispersed, theories of governmentality offer a useful
way to conceptualize television's power. In its simplest sense, governmentality refers to "how we
think about governing others and ourselves in a wide variety of contexts."' Scholars who use this
conceptual approach tend to focus on the proliferation of techniques through which individuals and
populations reflect upon, work on, and organize their lives and themselves as a condition of
citizenship. The term governmentality, particularly as it has been attributed to philosopher Michel
Foucault, also refers to how power operates in modern societies.2 Foucault used the term to elaborate
his view that power emanated from expertise, or the knowledges and procedures associated with
social institutions. For him, truth claims were specific not only to particular societies but also to
particular institutional "rationalities." In their capacity to authorize knowledge as truthful, institutions
exercised an authority over their subjects. Foucault emphasized a connection between the multiplicity
of rationalities in a society (and among societies) and the dispersion of how and where power is
exercised. Power operates as a network, he argued, distributed across the spheres of authority that
manage social subjects and problems through specific devices, skills, techniques, regimens, and
technologies. The spheres of social management set guidelines and rules (the Latin r(gula being the
cognate for words such as rule, regulation, and regularity) and foster regimens through which the
conduct of subjects is regulated and regularized and through which life is lived.
Foucault also emphasized the ethical dimensions of this way of exercising knowledge and power, an
objective of which is the wellbeing and civility of the social subjects who are brought under the care
of private experts and authorities. The civility of modern societies depends upon its guidelines,
regimens, and technologies, he suggested, and in turn the State depends upon the healthiness of a

"civil society." Civil society is essential to liberal capitalist societies because it guarantees a respect
for rules, and in this way it helps nourish the authority and "reason" of the State. According to
Foucault, it is the State's ability to encourage "freedom" as long as behavior is exercised responsibly
that enables it to "govern at a distance" rather than primarily by force.
Liberalism, for Foucault and his followers, does not refer to a political ideology (as in conservative
versus liberal), but instead to a "governmental rationality," or approach to governing through freedom.
Liberalism as a rationality of government has long presumed that rulers should only intervene in the
affairs of the "free" market and of individuals minimally, and with caution. Because of its laissezfaire sensibility, liberalism has always grappled with the nature and scope of State power, and has
tried to minimize the direct "rule of the State" whenever possible. This doesn't mean that liberalism as
a governing rationality is akin to anarchy, however. As the editors of Foucault and Political Reason
point out, freedom in the liberal sense always refers to a "well-regulated and responsibilized
liberty.i3 Liberalism is based on a paradox, then, in that while it advocates governing through (as
opposed to against) freedom, it also expects individuals to govern themselves properly - to choose
order over chaos and good behavior over deviance.
Foucault's work is especially helpful for understanding how power operates in societies whose
political, economic, and cultural modernity has been inextricable from a commitment to liberal
government. According to Foucault, liberalism as a governing rationality hinges on the "rational"
(restrained, calculated, rule-oriented) exercise of power, and on procedures for analyzing, knowing,
and calculating population and territory. Governmentality in this sense refers to a relation by the State
to civil society, defined as the array of social institutions and private forms of association that
comprise indispensable networks for exercising power and governing at a distance. Foucault's
writing about governmentality elaborated the technical means that linked ethics (conduct and
behavior) to liberalism's preoccupation with the government of the self and the State as "guardian of
`fair play' and of the rules of the game."4 Liberalism emphasized the "wise" and judicious exercise of
individual freedoms, he argued - a view that linked it not just to a general rationality in the modern
world but also to specific knowledges and techniques for exercising government of oneself. For
Foucault, liberalism valorizes a State that "watches over" and "looks after," measures, assesses,
"reflects upon," and acts upon the most propitious technologies of government available to it.
Collectively these technologies comprise (to use Foucault's clever phrase) "the reason of state," or
the justifications and requirements for the State to act as it can and does.
Liberalism's emphasis upon the "reason of state" expected individuals to actively participate in their
own governance. Effective government was to recognize the potential of private mechanisms of
administration and management as well as the government of the self. To explain the State's
rationalization of its role as welfare provider, Foucault often used the religious figure of the pastor,
or "shepherd" who watches over his flock. This wasn't to suggest that the Church's authority had been
replaced by the State, but that the State had technologized and acted on the pastoralism of the existing
institutions and activity that comprised civil society - what he referred to as "pastoral technology."'
Lest this seem to be a parable about how modern political subjects are sheep, Foucault also
elaborated how Christian techniques of "examination, confession, guidance, obedience, have an aim:
to get individuals to work at their own `mortification' in this world." By this he meant that the

techniques of working on and watching oneself developed through Christianity were also useful to a
liberal governing rationality. So on one hand, liberal government's rationalization of the Welfare State
(or what Antonio Gramsci called "the ethical state") has been "the tricky adjustment between political
power wielded over legal subjects and pastor power wielded over live [or better, the life of]
individuals." On the other, liberal government authorizes and relies upon the constitutive technologies
of the self, the technical reflection and resources by which individuals watch over themselves as
"free" citizen-subjects. In this sense, as Nikolas Rose contends, "to govern ... is to seek an authority
for one's authority."` The liberal State derives its authority and reason to govern from civil society.
Citizens derive their authority and their freedoms through various governmentalities.
Liberalism's schematization of civil society as the field of selfgovernance is not only about making
society civil and making government rational. It is also about making the social and the governmental
ecoiioric. "Free" market relations and liberal government developed through one another; the
modern "virtues" of laissez-faire capitalism were articulated through liberalism's reasoning about
freedoms, efficiency, and self-sufficiency as the basis for a civil society. Foucault understood the
relation between the emergence of political economy and liberalism in two respects: First, he noted a
transformation from the "art of government" to a scientific reasoning about processes of government,
society, and populations. Second, he noted the linkage between economy conceptualized as a
"naturally" self-regulating system and a governmental reasoning about rights and liberties. This
linkage provided the basis for envisioning government as "economical" and "efficient." It also
established a perpetual tension between the governing logic of freedoms and rights, and economic
inequalities. Because liberalism authorized a "free" market that tends to "amplify and consolidate"
existing inequalities, it also "imagines a government whose job it is to protect its individual subjects
unequally," notes Alexandra Chasin. Simply put, those individuals who inherit wealth, and whose
labor is particularly valued by the market economy, are in a better position to exercise liberal
freedoms and rights that are theoretically available to all citizens.'
A Foucaultian view of liberal government is especially useful for understanding what some have
referred to as advanced liberalism or "neoliberalism." Whether conceived as a new stage, or a
deepening of liberalism's longstanding tendencies, the present stage of liberalism involves a series of
initiatives and policies that have tied the "reinvention of government" to a broad rethinking and
remodeling of the Welfare State. There is a greater reliance on the privatization and personalization
of welfare than before as the State entrusts "pastoralism" to private entities (including media) and
emphasizes that citizens be not only active, but also "enterprising" in the pursuit of their own
empowerment and well-being. Most critics agree that the rationality of the "free" market is being
extended much more vociferously into every sector of society, and every dimension of governing,
including public programs and social services that developed in many capitalist democracies, in part
to address the human consequences of liberalism's laissez-faire sensibilities.' The management and
care of the self becomes an imperative in different, and arguably more urgent ways in such a climate,
not only in the sense of replacing public services, but in terms of obliging citizens to actualize and
"maximize" themselves not through "society" or collectively, but through their choices in the
privatized spheres of lifestyle, domesticity, and consumption.
Better Liviu through Reality TV offers an analytic of government, or an examination of the reach and

the limits of government, and a consideration of how it operates differently through spheres of activity
and sociality. An analytic of government considers the multiple ways that individuals and populations
are made and continually reinvented as active, responsible citizens. It is, in this sense, a process of
uiappiiW the strata and networks of government that authorize particular kinds of behavior and
citizenship. Placing TV in an analytic of government emphasizes television as a resource for
acquiring and coordinating the techniques for managing the various aspects of one's life. Rather than
thinking about TV as a general technology, or as part of "technocul- ture," it seeks to identify the
specific rationalities and technical applications that comprise TV and that have made it platter in
particular ways. One way is as a cultural technology that, working outside "public powers,"
governmentalizes by presenting individuals and populations as objects of assessment and
intervention, and by soliciting their participation in the cultivation of particular habits, ethics,
behaviors, and skills.
Rose's work is useful for situating television within a larger history of social and cultural
technologies that have been called upon to create citizens "who do not need to be governed by others,
but will govern themselves, master themselves, care for themselves."' This approach to governing can
be traced to the nineteenth century, when industrial capitalism gave shape to working-class
populations whose feared association with disease, drunkenness, squalor, criminality, and vice made
elites uneasy. What Rose calls the impetus to "govern in the interests of morality and order" gained
influence during this time, brushing up against the liberal desire to "restrict government in the interests
of liberty and economy." The development of expertise - along with professionals to authorize and
administer it - provided one way of shaping and guiding human beings toward "better" strategies of
selfregulation that was not tied to official state power. Professionalized medicine, psychiatry,
philanthropy, social work, and scientific charity operated as diffused technologies of "indirect
government" by seeking to influence people's conduct and habits in a range of specialized arenas,
including health, hygiene, morality, recreation, and domestic arrangements." The emerging institutions
of high culture also worked as indirect technologies of government: as Tony Bennett has shown, the
political rationalities of libraries and public museums went beyond the circulation of knowledge to
the installation of middle-class forms of behavior, including a propensity for self-discipline." The
nascent mass-culture industry also emerged as a technology for "governing at a distance" to the extent
that penny newspapers, mass-circulation magazines, nickelodeons, and silent feature films circulated
forms of professional advice, social rules, and procedures, and techniques for everyday living within
the cultural economy of capitalist democracy. Mass media could not be counted upon to govern in the
hoped for ways of rulers and elites, however. In fact, reformers worried endlessly about
commercialized mass aniusenients precisely because they feared their capacity to instill the "wrong"
habits and behaviors in the populace.
Thinking of television as a cultural technology requires us to overcome a tendency in media studies to
think about media either as political economic practice or cultural practice, to think about these as
fundamentally different, or to think that media can be understood only as one or both. We use the term
"cultural technology" to underscore the extent to which television culture is an object of regulation,
policy, and programs designed to nurture citizenship and civil society, and an instrument for
educating, improving, and shaping subjects. 12 In establishing TV as a cultural technology, we offer

an alternative to approaches to television culture conceived as a system of representation, meaning,

and formal convention that is specific to TV, which tends to understand power as a matter of making
meaning and changing minds, and understand the rules of watching and living with TV as mostly a set
of stylistic and textual codes and conventions.13
Another implication of TV as a cultural technology concerns the arts and sciences of cultivation.
Rather than seeing culture as art, or art as the opposite of science and administration, we consider
how TV has operated as both art and science, or to invoke a premodern term, as tediue, artfulness
with certain skills and applications. The term "craft" is also a useful way of thinking about TV as
teckue since crafting refers, more than art or science, to the everyday making and modulation that has
been typical of reality TV's games, lessons, and demonstrations.,4 By thinking about TV as a cultural
technology, we are emphasizing TV as a resource for acquiring and applying practical knowledges
and skills. Since the late 1990s, TV has reinvented older formats such as drama and news around the
expertise and authority of technicians - profilers, doctors, lawyers, police, and other emergency
responders. More recently, a burgeoning regime of TV production has focused on self-help education
and lifestyle instruction. Demonstrations in home decoration, car styling and upkeep, what and what
not to wear, and cooking are both arts and sciences, or (put another way) they involve mastering
certain techniques for beautification, health, and well-being. "Culture" in this sense refers to the
cultivation and management of life and growth. TV as cultivation involves designing plans for putting
things in an order to ensure maximum productivity and the achievement of goals.'s As programs for
cultivation, TV offers ways of tending to (of governing) the little, banal tasks of daily life and linking
knowledge and skill to the aduiiuistration of one's household, family, and self. These personal
programs of cultivation also provide a way of shaping the civil society upon which liberal
government depends and acts. The mastering of techniques for applying, conducting, and cultivating
oneself in the best way possible is a component of improving oneself as a matter of self-governance.
In this way, reality TV operates as a dimension of the private "outsourcing" and outreach through
which the current stage of liberal government rationalizes public welfare and security.
Another dimension of TV as a cultural technology concerns selfcultivation as self-improvement and
self-reliance. Our emphasis here is on the "care of the self' through TV programs working as
technologies of governance. How has television "technologized the self," or the many selves, that are
required to manage daily life? What are the possibilities for actualizing a self that is more or less
engaged with television? What kinds of knowledges does "self-actualization" involve in the current
epoch, and how does TV mediate these knowledges? How is learning how to accomplish certain
tasks, apply oneself in particular ways, and model certain types of behavior tantamount to living a
more "rewarding," "satisfying" life? Reality TV's guidelines and regimens are practical, everyday
technologies of the self. They are to be applied through common exercises in which we are "put to the
test" and experiment in living our lives as we do. This perspective is particularly useful in
considering how TV is being reinvented to make itself more useful as a resource for expanding one's
capabilities, fashioning a "better" life, and developing strategies for addressing problems or threats
pertaining to one's body, household, work, property, and family. In this sense, self-cultivation is a
technical achievement.
Foucault used the expression "technology of the self' to describe how an individual's freedom and

agency are technical achievements that involve working on, watching over, and applying oneself in
particular ways. The paradox he describes is in one's reliance upon various techniques for exercising
freedom and agency. Freedom is not the opposite of control but is a matter of how one controls
oneself by exercising freedom "correctly" through various technologies and rules of self-governance,
including those provided by reality TV. Exercising freedom, as a matter of learning how to act and
behave, makes the self a conductor of power in two senses: as someone empowered to take charge of
one's life, and also as someone who can effectively conduct a charge (as certain metals conduct
electricity), or someone who can deliver what is expected. In one's ability to practice freedom well
and responsibly and in one's reliance upon the technologies of the self one becomes a good conductor
of power in both senses.
TV as cultural technology of self-actualization operates as a form of citizenship training. Liberal
government, particularly in the United States, has left citizens primarily to their own devices in
understanding what citizenship involves.16 When citizenship education is privatized, television's
instrumentality as a cultural technology is to link practices of self-cultivation and self-fashioning to
the lessons and tests of citizenship. By demonstrating for and with viewers the techniques for taking
care of oneself, reality TV supports the governmental rationalities of self-reliance that have become
so pivotal to the current stage of liberal government." Conceptualizing television in this way takes us
beyond the concerns of political economy and cultural studies to a consideration of the technical
resources through which we reflect and act upon ourselves as citizen-subjects. It moves us beyond an
understanding of governing that is limited to formal institutions, processes, and rituals such as voting
to a broader consideration of how we come (partly through media) to govern ourselves and our lives
in ordinary, dispersed, and highly personalized ways. Analyzing television as a cultural technology
that both enables and directs the government of the self also requires us to think outside analytical
binaries such as resistance/ domination and freedom/control.
While we introduce these terms in order to think about reality TV as a set of demonstrations in civic
virtues and good citizenship through self-fashioning, we want to stress that these lessons do not
necessarily affirm the settledness of rules and laws, nor do they have predictable results or "effects."
Their political mattering needs to be understood in terms of how they are taken up, applied, and acted
upon by institutions, associations, and citizens in the making. To emphasize the unsettledness of
reality TV's guidelines for living, we reiterate that its lessons often take the form of experiments or
"civic laboratories,"' in which human subjects are tested on their ability to master certain
technologies of citizenship, and to fashion themselves in relation to particular civic virtues. As is
evident in Todd TV, the successes are as important as the failures, and the experimentalism matters as
much as the game of competition. Collectively and cumulatively, the experiments point to television's
effort to try out, refine, reinvent, and act upon available technologies of citizenship as solutions to
perceived problems of government. In this respect, Better Living through Reality TV seeks to
understand the conditions for testing and demonstrating the government of the self in relation to
current political rationalities. We are less focused on how reality TV validates or subverts liberalism
as an ideology than in how it catalyzes and acts upon techniques and rationalities of governing.
Analyzing how television is being instrumentalized as part of programs of social service, social
welfare, and social management does not begin with the assumption that TV always has authority, or

that it produces predictable or uniform political effects. TV's political effectivity must be understood
in terms of the complex, varied, and interlocking resources through which TV is authorized to operate
in certain ways, and to authorize the particular forms of behavior upon which a civil society is
achieved, secured, and mobilized.
Placing TV in an analytic of government has led us to rethink some of the terminology that defines
television. One has to do with an object of our analysis - the TV program. While the term most
commonly is used to refer to any kind of production on television, our inflection focuses on the
regularity and regulating quality of television as a framework for taking small steps in living life that
may be promised or imagined to have enormous (and not just monetary) rewards. In this framework,
the program involves taking these steps through a series of small tests, each requiring a correct
response and a small reward or pleasure, before proceeding. In this way, the TV program is being
reinvented as an instructional template for taking care of oneself and becoming self-enterprising as a
path to (among other things) "empowered" citizenship. This way of conceptualizing the TV program
allows for the customization and personalization of regimens for managing the different spheres of
everyday life." It also leads us beyond TV to other media, materials, and technologies (magazines,
books, the Web, MP3 kits) that constitute larger, interdependent cultural networks or relays of
resources and support. To consider TV programs as resources for personal regimens we need to
understand how television is instrumentalized as one component of these interdependent networks.
Yet, it is also the case that TV programs are different from other media in their serialization and daily
regularization. So, although the TV program may direct viewers to other resources for becoming
active custodians of their lives, television provides the framework for starting and maintaining a
regimen for better living. Unlike other media that require users to search out and to pick resources,
TV's programmatic serialization supports in its provision of a framework for better living.
Placing TV in an analytic of government is also useful for understanding the heightened attention to the
"care of the self' in a political rationality that values private over public, self-sufficiency over
"dependency," and personal responsibility over collective or "socialistic" conceptions of society.
Without dismissing the individual rewards of self-actualization, it is important to recognize how the
present stage of liberal governing undercuts earlier promises of equality, prosperity, and security. In
certain respects, reality and lifestyle TV represents nothing short of the current conception of social
welfare, or the means through which all citizens - whatever their resources and histories of
disenfranchisement - are expected to "take responsibility" for their fate. Understanding how TV
operates as a new form of neoliberalized social service, social welfare, and social management
involves turning attention to the formation of specific networks between TV, the State, and private
(volunteer and corporate) entities, which act upon each other and which citizens must rely upon and
navigate. Focusing on TV involves recognizing that neoliberalism cannot be understood as a paradigm
without attending to the everyday practices of living through and within the governmental rationalities
that comprise and reproduce it.
Reinventing Government
Better Living through Reality TV focuses on how reality TV has materialized within the current stage

of liberal government. While the comprehensive histories of liberalism and television are well
beyond our scope, it is helpful to begin by sketching out some of the ways that government and
television have been reinvented through one another. The discourse about something called
"reinventing government" emerged in the United States in the 1980s, and intensified in the 1990s. It
would be simplistic to suggest that this discourse was entirely new, however. As Foucault's work
demonstrates, liberal government has always been inclined to survey and act upon the programs and
associations that comprise civil society, and to rationalize itself through improving, "advancing," and
modernizing the technologies of government in this way. Liberalism "inaugurates a continual
dissatisfaction with government, a perpetual questioning of whether the desired effects are being
produced, of the mistakes of thought or policy that hamper the efficacy of government, a recurrent
diagnosis of failure coupled with a recurrent demand to govern better," explains Rose.20 The
paradox, as Rose suggests, is that government becomes a mechanism for diagnosing, correcting, and
curing the ailments of government. This informs the discourse of government's "reinventing" itself, a
broad political effort to overcome or overturn what were increasingly viewed as perversions of
liberalism by the policies of social welfare enacted from the 1930s through the 1960s. The
intensification of the concern with making over government, and of designing a government that
"frees" citizens of cycles of dependency on government set into motion by these "perversions," is a
dimension of what Rose and other political observers describe as the advanced or "neo" stage of
liberalism.''
By neoliberalism, we refer to the historical formation that has emerged from the renewal of liberalism
as an "improvement" over the past." The early stage of the discourse of reinventing government
emphasized the value of public-private partnerships and outsourcing the activities of government to
businesses. This discourse developed through an emerging group of think tanks, political action
groups, and private associations dedicated to correcting what they considered to be the
ineffectiveness of "big government." One prominent buzzword concerned the "privatization" of
government, a phrase associated particularly with Peter Drucker's influential 1968 book The Aye of
Discontinuity.a3 Drucker, like the economist Friedrich von Hayek (whose theories were also
beginning to gain prominence and influence in the United States during the 1960s), cited Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union as evidence of a malaise resulting from government of the social,
caused by the diminishment of individual freedoms at the hands of government interventionism.24
Drucker argued that government ailed from decades of expanding bureaucracies and the swelling size
of public welfare programs administered by the federal government. The remedy he proposed was
"reprivatization," whereby corporate management would become the model, and in certain cases the
administrative arm, of state government. ''
By the 1980s, Hayek's provocation to imagine a new liberalism, and Drucker's rationale for publicprivate partnerships to reform state government, had developed into reform initiatives.26 The
discourse about reinventing government gained traction through campaigns to describe Ronald
Reagan's administration policy as the Reagan Revolution, and his 1984 reelection promise of a "new
morning in America." Over the late 1980s, Republican and Democratic candidates for city and state
government extolled the virtues of "restructuring," "right-sizing," and "catalyzing" private agencies to
take over public administration, and promoted slogans like "decentralization" "entrepreneurial

government," and "results not rules."'' In October, 1989, the cover of Time magazine asked "Is
Government Dead?," while the story inside reflected on one of Reagan's favored aphorisms,
"Government isn't the solution; it's the problem."
"Reinventing government" subsequently became the key term in the Clinton administration's
explanation of its policy objectives. During his campaign in 1992, Bill Clinton endorsed David
Osborne and Ted Gaebler's influential 1992 book Reiuveutiug Goverfunent: Hour the Entrepreneurial
Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector, claiming it "should be read by every elected official in
America. Those of us who want to revitalize government ... have to reinvent it. This book gives us a
blueprint." Early in his presidency, Clinton established the National Partnership for Reinventing
Government (NPRG), with Vice President Al Gore as its point person. Its aim was to "make the entire
federal government less expensive and more efficient, and to change the culture of our national
bureaucracy away from complacency and entitlement toward initiative and empowerment."
Perpetuating the terminology of the 1980s critique of "big government" as bureaucratic, the Clinton
administration cast its plan for reinventing government as a public-private "partnership" to be
achieved by "changing government to be more results and performance oriented," "serving people [as
customers] better," "changing the way that government works with business and community," and
"transforming access to government through [information/communication] technology." While coming
this time from Democrats, the initiative acted upon an array of city and state initiatives that predated
the Clinton administration - such as the Empower American initiative for "public private partnership"
launched in 1993 by the Republican former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp that were already making the work of government coextensive with the operations and management of
private programs.
While the NPRG might have been partly a political strategy to coopt a trend that had gained
momentum during the Reagan and Bush eras, it codified both a model for administering welfare in
sync with deregulatory policies, and the energetic "makeover" of public agencies built through and
associated with the Democratic party.'' The NPRG also justified the Clinton-Gore administration's
role in the passage of welfare reform legislation, including welfare-to-work policies and the Personal
Responsibility Act of 1996, that promised to break cycles of dependency by "empowering" recipients
to "help themselves" by demonstrating their "personal responsibility" as citizens to the State and to
themselves. In addition to welfare reform, the Clinton administration encouraged volunteerism,
creating both the Corporation for National and Community Service and Americorp, a federally funded
organization that rearticulated Kennedy-era Peace Corps and Vista Volunteer programs. Contrary to
those 1960s programs, however, the civic responsibilization associated with mobilizing a network of
volunteers and nonprofit groups was bound to a logic of citizenship that emphasized personal
responsibility.
The expansion of public-private partnerships, welfare reform, and volunteerism during the Clinton
era helped rationalize yet another reinvention of government proposed by the Bush administration, a
"compassionate conservatism" whose primary cure for publicly administered welfare was a FaithBased and Community Initiative (FBCI).29 As a network for privatizing forms of social welfare
through church and civic associations, the FBCI claimed to offer "a fresh start and bold new approach
to government's role in helping those in need." Too often, explained its web site, "the government has

ignored and impeded the efforts of faith-based and community organizations. Their compassionate
efforts to improve their communities have been needlessly and improperly inhibited by bureaucratic
red-tape and restrictions." As of 2003, no fewer than seven government agencies were called upon to
assist in correcting this problem, coordinated by an Office of FaithBased and Community Initiatives
and supported by the Compassion Capital Fund. The FBCI became the "umbrella" for the USA
Freedom Corps Volunteer Network, the Volunteers for Prosperity (a volunteerarm of the USAID), and
the Citizen Corps, which quickly became a branch of volunteerism associated with Homeland
Security. Through these volunteer service networks, the Bush administration boasted that 64.5 million
US citizens had participated in volunteer services - a number that increased by 5 million during his
presidency. The FBCI, as a rationality for welfare administration and reform, was able to mobilize
both an expanding array of private programs for administering welfare, and a prevailing reasoning
about "taking care of oneself" as a means to self-empowerment and active citizenship. Yet in the Bush
administration, acting upon private, religious, and community agencies became a framework not only
for reinventing government but also for improvement (for finally getting things right) by administering
government programs through moral and religious agency and authority. As yet another experiment in
liberal government and a deepening of the trend toward neoliberal public policy, the FBCI has made
social welfare moral by redefining its "virtues" as a new relationship between government, the
church, and communitarianism. For example, whereas the Clinton era Hope VI program was about
nurturing "public-private partnership" and "restoring" community activism in the reinvention of public
housing (and by example social welfare), the Housing and Urban Development arm of the Bush
administration's FBCI had a new mission of linking homeownership to good citizenship and assuring
that the US Department of Housing and Development (HUD)'s rehabilitation programs were
accomplished less directly through "government intervention" and more through Community
Development Corporations.
The FBCI was the initial experiment for demonstrating a "new" authority and responsibility on the
part of government, private institutions, religious and community programs, and citizens. Although the
experiment has continued, the FBCI became subordinated to the Bush administration's "war on terror"
and the accompanying rationale for a Homeland Defense. In Bush's address to the US Senate
commending them for support of his "faith-based" legislation in 2001, he stated that the initiative
would "encourage more charitable giving and rally the armies of compassion that exist in
communities all across America" (emphasis added). The contradiction of a FBCI in a "war on terror"
has been that only certain religious and communitarian programs - those that have "proper" religious
and political authority - are considered legitimate by this agency.
If a primary objective of public-private partnerships and volunteer service networks during the 1990s
was achieving greater efficiency by privatizing welfare, casting government in a supportive role,
helping citizens take care of themselves, then the institution of a Homeland Security after September
11, 2001 emphasizes security through "publicprivate partnership," with "Homeland Security" as the
ridgepole and primary rationalization for all other forms of social welfare. The Bush administration
has rationalized a strategy for Homeland Defense through policies and experiments that have made
waging a "war on terror" tantamount to the purposes of social welfare and security - not only a matter
of diminishing programs of social welfare and security that had been instituted since the 1930s, but of

redirecting their usefulness through a different model of security and of state/civilian responsibility."'
The Citizen Corps and other programs of citizen "empowerment" have been recent examples of the
new regime of public-private partnerships and volunteer networks. Within this governmental
rationality about welfare citizenship and civic responsibility, Homeland Security is nothing short of a
new "social security.""
The relation between FBCI and Homeland Security is a significant development for thinking about the
most recent strategies for "reinventing government," because the former's effort to act upon private
networks (as religious and moral providers of welfare) shaped the latter as the largest department
created by the federal government since the presidency of Harry Truman. Although the Bush
administration has been criticized by libertarians in his own party for "reinventing government" as
"big government," Homeland Security is profoundly a department that operates in a "supportive"
posture - educating citizens about how they can look after themselves by locating private resources,
as evidenced by its response to Hurricane Katrina, which demonstrated just how deeply this "state of
the art" bureaucracy is about offloading responsibility rather than providing assistance.
As Paul du Gay argues in In Praise of Bureaucracy, the rationale for the "entrepreneurial government"
which has developed since the 1980s requires that government be reinvented to cure a moral and
ethical defectiveness attributed to the modern bureaucracy perceived as endemic to public planning,
welfare, and administration.32 While bureaucracy has been a feature of corporate management as
well as of public administration since the late nineteenth century, the aversion to bureaucracy has
been most fervently and commonly directed over the last three decades at public administrative
bureaucracy. According to this rationale, state bureaucracy is a moral danger that breeds dependency,
limits growth, and suppresses freedom. The proponents of entrepreneurial government promise to
solve this problem by making government operate more like a corporate enterprise, and by replacing
the bureaucrat with the manager (and the citizen with the consumer). The rationalization of
entrepreneurial government, as represented particularly by "compassionate conservatism" and the
FBCI's sponsorship of civic volunteer networks, is also, however, profoundly moralistic. As du Gay
explains, "the defining feature of entrepreneurial government is its generalization of an `enterprise
form' to all forms of conduct - `to the conduct of organizations hitherto seen as being noneconomic, to
the conduct of government, and to the conduct of individuals themselves."' To correct the malaise of
public administration involves not only making private agencies more responsible for public
assistance - as in the moral crusade of Bush's effort to mobilize "armies of compassion" and the
"outreach" programs of TV discussed above - but also transforming individuals into more
responsible, accountable, and enterprising managers of themselves. An economy that requires
workers to undergo lifelong retraining to make themselves relevant within a "flexible" workforce and
to compensate for the deterioration of both corporate-sponsored and state-sponsored pension systems
also requires endless training about how to manage the various aspects of one's everyday life where
one is increasingly at risk and exposed.
Reinventing Television
How does television, and particularly reality TV, fit into the reinvention of government? Considering

(albeit schematically) three historical conjunctures allows us to clarify how television operates
within the current stage of liberal government, with its strategies of privatization, volunteerism,
entrepreneurialism, and responsibilization. The first conjuncture is the emergence of broadcasting in
the United States as a technology for conjoining the public and private interest. This is a complicated
history, already addressed by several scholars," but some points are worth emphasizing. Since the
1920s, US broadcast policy has attempted to solve certain tensions, contradictions, and problems
about what commercial broadcasting as a "public service" entails. These include how to make
broadcasting compatible with reasoned and principled oversight, how to oversee the "rational"
balance of programming and distribution of programmers in the name of the public good, and how
best to represent the freedoms and responsibilities of private broadcasting companies. Early US
policy was not unique in regulating broadcasting as a public service, but in the United States this
quickly became a very specific set of problems and solutions, for the provision of broadcasting as
public service has been inseparable from the provision of safeguarding "free TV." This involved not
only broadcasting's relation to private ownership by what had become major broadcasting and cinema
corporations following World War II, but also to a governmental rationality in which radio and
television mattered as technologies of territorial/ global expansion, mass suburbanization, market
growth, and mobility. Unlike broadcasting in the rest of the world, broadcasting in the United States
was not produced or distributed through publicly administered agencies (e.g., the British
Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC), and so a distinct governmental problem about its relation to
education/welfare/service developed. As a Cold War model of "economic government," the State
supported and, through a supportive role, policed the freedom of broadcast industries to operate and
to form national and regional networks as long as they represented something called "the public
interest." This rationale presumed that the public interest was best served by the growth and selfregulative capacities of the private sector, even as government and industry continually sought
propitious arrangements for accomplishing "oversight." During the period following World War II,
this arrangement was rationalized partly in terms of "propaganda" in Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union (and to a lesser extent, the paternalistic or autocratic example of British broadcasting) and
partly in terms of the grave responsibility of the United States, and its commercial television system,
to be a good model for liberal democracy to the rest of the world.
Television developed in the United States after two decades of reflection about how best to regulate
private broadcasting.34 In this sense, TV emerged as a problem of government - specifically, how to
advance a self-regulating, for-profit, private industry that provided a "public service.i35 Since the
foundation of commercial broadcasting had already been rationalized, this became mainly a matter of
ensuring program quality and diversity, which (especially during the Cold War era) were considered
tantamount to citizenship, civil society, democracy, and the health of the nation. In 1946, on the cusp
of the emergence of broadcast TV, the federal government outlined the kinds of services it was
supposed to provide - "entertainment, religious, commercial, educational, agricultural, fraternal" even as it clearly laid the responsibility for doing this with private companies, stating that the
responsibilities for improving broadcast services rested with "forces" other than the federal
government.36 The "other forces" included, first and foremost, "self-regulation by the industry itself,"
but also professional journalistic critics, citizen councils, colleges and universities, and workshops in short, a range of private associations and agents comprising a civil society mediated through radio

and television. The regulatory role of the Federal Communication Association (FCC) during TV's
emergence during this period had mostly to do with granting and reviewing broadcast licenses, as a
way of rationalizing - i.e., making orderly, fair, and responsive - the idea of commercial television as
a public service.
Within this conjuncture, TV's orientation as an educational medium came less from broadcasting
companies than from philanthropic and academic sources. The Ford Foundation, university educators,
and social scientists like Wilbur Schramm provided the impetus for early experiments in educational
programming and the creation of a limited Educational Television Network (ETV). Their demands for
"better" television were influential in reinforcing the fundamental distinction between education and
entertainment through which broadcasting emerged as a problem of government.37 The liberal ideal
of maximizing private profit in the name of the public good was unrealizable to the extent that "public
service" was closely tied to unprofitable high cultural and informational programming. This had been
demonstrated by the 1920s, in the case of radio. The emergence of deeply marginalized educational
(and later public) TV channels partly managed this problem, but posed other worries and recurring
controversies. If educational TV smacked to some of experiments in state-sponsored broadcasting,
commercial TV's contribution to "mass culture" continued to undermine, as Dwight MacDonald had
famously argued, the distinction between the gullibility of citizens in "totalitarian" states and the
rationality of liberal government in democratic nations such as the United States."
This is not to say that commercial TV in the 1950s completely lacked programs of civic, educational,
and cultural uplift. NBC and CBS programmed short-lived adaptations of literary and theatrical
works, all carrying the brand of single sponsors (e.g., Goodyear Playhouse, Kraft Television Theater,
Philco Television Playhouse). The Ford Foundation's Omnibus (1952-9) is the most dramatic
example of programming whose cultural import was tantamount to viewer improvement through
liberal arts instruction, and therefore to the shaping of citizenship through television. While these
programs became increasingly anomalous to the objectives of commercial broadcasting during the
1950s, television was replete with forms of technical instruction that operated as a cultural
technology in a different way. Popular TV genres of the 1950s provided ethical demonstrations and
moral exercises about the micro-mechanisms of civil society, and guided citizenship in that way. A
popular domestic comedy like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriett represented problems and
solutions in domestic and family governance that were not entirely disconnected from mental hygiene
classroom films shown during those years.39 From its earliest foray into TV production in 1954, The
Walt Disney Corporation developed instructional entertainment for children, from science
documentaries to lessons in good conduct produced for Walt Disney Presents (ABC and NBC) to the
activities of the Mickey Mouse Club, which provided both an extension of and alternative to the
institutions of public schooling.40 Through its entertainment, in other words, commercial
programming demonstrated the viability of the private institutions comprising a "civil society."
The discourse of diversity in programming became a key objective of the 1960s, the second
conjuncture of TV as public service. This was the theme of FCC Chairman Newton Minow's 1961
address to the National Association of Broadcasters, in which he famously deemed US commercial
television a "vast wasteland." Minow criticized the mediocrity of television, attributing the problem
to the absence of "educational, religious, instructive, or other public service program- ming."41

Minow was concerned with the same problem as earlier reformers - that is, broadcasters' favoring of
"shallow" and formulaic entertainment over unprofitable high cultural and informational formats.
However, unlike previous FCC officials, his plea for "more choices" presumed that greater
government involvement could maximize "free enterprise" as a path to better television. "I urge you,"
he stated to broadcasters, "to put the people's airwaves to the service of the people and the cause of
freedom" (emphasis added). Minow's formula for achieving these goals involved a paradox: On the
one hand, the regulator wanted to avoid sacrificing the public interest to an industry driven purely by
commercial interests (permitting "yourselves [the media industry] to become so absorbed in the chase
for ratings, sales, and profits that you lose the wider view"). On the other hand, he wanted to avoid
turning the FCC into a state bureaucracy (not allowing "ourselves to become so bogged down in the
mountain of papers, hearings, memoranda, orders, and the daily routines that we close our eyes to the
wider view of public interest"). Minow's rationalization of the TV problem gestured toward the
creation of a state-supported Corporation for Public Broadcasting, yet remained committed to publicprivate partnership in which "excellence" in TV was to be an objective both of corporate management
(as a purveyor of ratings and sales) and of education (as a purveyor of quality TV, cultural uplift, and
good citizenship).
A similar commitment to the advancement of TV as a public service through a self-managing private
media industry was apparent in President Lyndon Johnson's rationale for the 1967 Public
Broadcasting Act. In the United States, federal funding for public broadcasting hinged on intersecting
goals: uplifting the mass citizenry while helping to deliver an underclass out of poverty through
televised liberal arts education, and serving the cultural needs of "opinion leaders" i11- served by
commercial television's amusements. 42 Public TV was also a programmatic experiment in achieving,
representing, and safeguarding diversity as enhanced program choice. In all of these ways, public
TV's formation became a prong of a new stage of liberal government which John F. Kennedy had
christened the New Frontier, and Johnson had just as ambitiously extolled as the Great Society.
Public TV, as a form of state welfare and as public service, was rationalized in terms of its potential
to educate. As Johnson stated, "I and convinced that a vital and self-sufficient non-commercial
television system will not only instruct, but inspire and uplift our people."" The problem was how to
fashion a public service that, in Johnson's words, was "absolutely free from any Federal Government
interference in programming." The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was safeguarded from "state
control" not only through its private nonprofit status, but through its reliance on monetary
contributions from corporations and private donors (here, public TV mirrored other public-service
programs, including Housing and Urban Development and NASA, that were advancing liberal
government as public-private partnerships). The connection between public TV and these other
fledgling, partly privatized programs of public welfare and services was, in some instances, quite
direct - as when Johnson directed the relatively young NASA and the Department of Health,
Education, and Welfare (HEW) "to conduct experiments on the requirements for such a ["publicbroadcast"] system, and for instructional TV, in cooperation with other interested agencies of the
Government and the private sector. ,44
The third conjuncture of television began in the late 1970s and continued into the 1980s, as TV was
reorganized through the proliferation of cable and satellite channels. At this stage, the problem of how

to manage program diversity was "solved" through a deregulated media economy that emphasized
viewing flexibility and greater "consumer choice." Ideals of liberal education and uplift through mass
broadcasting gave way to the empowerment of cultural collectivities conceptualized as taste and
lifestyle clusters and to shaping citizens through these technologies. For example, the mantra of early
MTV broadcasts was "We want our MTV!" - a rallying cry for mobilizing youth through television as
never before, except at the fringes of programming. The identity politics of the 1960s, which had in
part informed the Great Society experiments in governing, became a basis for liberalizing
broadcasting through private cable and satellite technolo- gies.45 Since commercial TV was no
longer dominated by the three broadcast networks, and lack of program choice was no longer the
unresolvable dilemma it had been perceived to be during the 1950s and 1960s, public TV's mission
as a dignified alternative to mass entertainment also began to matter differently from before. The
earlier idea of public TV was difficult to maintain amid the proliferation of cable channels, each
representing not only a segment of the public as lifestyle cluster, but their own forms of television as
pedagogy.
To speak of TV's reinvention, and to understand this process in terms of the initiatives to reinvent
government over the 1980s and 1990s, is to recognize how the "TV program" was changing through
the proliferation of cable networks. TV programs were no longer simply broadcasts, but were
constitutive of a network's brand and the basis for viewers' investment in specific forms of televisual
association and membership. They became part of the network as program, integral to its
representation of a particular lifestyle. The serialization of TV made it suited to operate as part of a
daily regimen, and the programmatic potential of cable networks meant that the TV program (as
regimen) could become a technology for self-actualization (i.e., for being young, or a woman, or
black). The network made TV integral to living, shaping, and often improving one's life through a set
of resources that could be oriented to the requirements of particular lifestyles and lifestyle problems.
So, for example, MTV converted from nonstop music videos during the 1980s to a network comprised
of multiple genres representing different aspects of a youthful lifestyle during the 1990s. Collectively,
the proliferation of new channels also required more refined technologies of consumer choice and
self-enterprise, such as the remote control, the time-shifting VCR, and more recently the DVK, to
make the TV program more useful within one's particular lifestyle. In this sense, the TV program
became about the civic virtues and tools of specific forms of televisual membership as cultural
citizenship. Or, put another way, televisual citizenship became tied to techniques of participation and
membership, and to the investments of economic and cultural capital by viewers and channels
comprising the cable network paradigm.
The capacity of cable networks in the United States to have developed as technologies of selfactualization became particularly evident in the 1990s, with the emergence of entire networks devoted
to popular lifestyle instruction. Some of the most successful of these networks have included the
Home and Garden Network, the Food Network, the Fine Living Channel, Fit TV, the Learning
Channel, and the Do-it-Yourself Network. As the decade progressed, cable networks not specifically
devoted to lifestyle instruction began to integrate more pedagogic elements into their schedules. This
did more than deepen the role of the cable network as helping "program"; it also linked the discourse
of self-actualization to practical technologies of selfmanagement and the care of the self. While

television prior to this stage presented some of the material to make this connection, it lacked the
rationales for doing so. Only in the current stage of liberalism, with its specific requirements of
entrepreneurialism and self-responsibilization, do the techniques of everyday self-management
become so central to television's governing role. This explains why makeover productions, which
have existed since the origins of broadcasting, have only fairly recently begun to proliferate across a
wide range of TV networks.
The convergence of media has also contributed to television's role in disseminating technical
strategies of self-management and care. The reinvention of the TV program has enabled television to
become more instrumental within existing cultures of self-help, which have been valued since the
1980s and which are now considered an integral component of post-welfare government. The strategy
of embedding the TV program within lifestyle clusters inserted television within an economy for
delivering viewers to the commercial providers of resources required to maintain those lifestyles. In
so doing, it provided a mechanism for delivering customers from one medium (TV) to another, a point
that Andrew Goodwin has made about the formation of MTV.4` Political-economic analyses have
shown how reality TV facilitates a similar means of capitalizing upon "tie-ins" amongst media.47 We
wish to underscore how TV's salience to a governmental regime of self-help has brought it into a vital
relation with other technologies of self-actualization and self-management. This includes older media
such as magazines, books, and manuals that are being repurposed through other media or as packages,
such as holistic healer Deepak Chopra's combination of book and MP3 player. However, television's
instrumentality as a technology of contemporary citizenship particularly relies on Web-based
resources. The Web has become a resource through which enterprising individuals can help
themselves, and many TV programs since the late 1990s have mobilized it as a way to personalize
and customize televisual instruction. In some respects, TV's convergence with other forms of media
has revitalized the ideal of hone-based education as citizenship training. At the same time, the
portability of these media has extended the potential scope of televisual education to multiple
locations and spheres of activity.48 TV's lasting value may have to do with its rootedness in daily
life, as a serialized framework for personal regimens. One may need to work to seek out advice on
the Web or in a magazine, but TV delivers pupils punctually at predictable times of the day. TV's
programmed features - what Raymond Williams famously described as its structured "flow" - make it
less a medium that one "picks up" than a medium one synchronizes one's life with. Sticking with a
regimen sometimes requires the means of regularizing lifestyle and choices in this way. Such is TV's
"helping" culture.
While we have considered the relation between reinventing government and TV in three conjunctures,
our project seeks to describe an emergent one. TV's insertion into an economy for delivering viewers/
consumers from one medium to another is central to our account of the current stage of liberal
government in two respects. The first is that the "TV network" is not simply a relay within various
communication networks or a generalized "network society." It has become an integral relay within
the entrepreneurial networks of welfare provision and private social support. The second is that
citizenship is less an objective or outcome of TV's ideological work on subjects than an achievement
that depends upon the TV programs through which one actively enters into these networks. The
following chapters provide an analysis of this emerging conjuncture by tracing some of these entry

points and showing how they connect citizens, government, and television.

Chapter 1

Charity TV:
Privatizing Care, Mobilizing Compassion
On January 16, 2006, The New York Times announced a positive trend in reality TV: "do-good"
programs had emerged to provide housing, healthcare, and general help to the needy. The article
focused on Miracle Workers, an ABC series that intervenes in the lives of "seriously ill people who
lack the contacts or the money for treatment." A team of doctors and nurses provided by the TV
network steers people to the "latest medical breakthroughs" while TV cameras "capture the drama of
patient-hood, from consultations to surgery to recovery." ABC pays for medical treatments not
covered by private health insurance, as was the case in an episode featuring the Gibbs family of
Florida, whose father and son underwent surgical procedures to remove brain tumors that cost the
commercial TV network more than $100,000. Besides footing the bill for the surgeries, ABC's
medical team "asked the questions they did not know to ask, held their hands, made the arrangements,"
reported The Times. According to Mr. Gibbs, who described his family as "average people," it was
television's close involvement that got them through the ordeal.' At a juncture when reality TV is
being offered as a solution to the plight of people like the Gibbs and, implicitly, to the lingering social
problems of a post-welfare society as well, the management of "neediness" presents a useful place to
begin our examination of contemporary television as a technology of governance.
This chapter considers TV's efforts to intervene in the lives of "real" people cast as unable (or
unwilling) to care for themselves adequately in the current epoch of privatization and selfresponsibilization. It is a sign of the times that hundreds of thousands of individuals now apply
directly to reality TV programs not only for medical needs, but also for decent housing (Extreme
Makeover: Home Edition, Town Haul, Mobile Home Disasters), tuition, and income assistance (The
Scholar, Three Wishes), transportation (Pimp My Ride), disaster relief (Three Wishes, Home
Edition), food, clothing, and other basic material needs (Random One, Renovate My Family). This is
not an entirely new phenomenon: In the 1950s, game shows such as Queen for a Day and Strike it
Rich showered needy contestants with cash prizes, goods, and services donated by sponsors.
However, today's charitable interventions are much more extravagant and prolific, appearing on
network and cable channels during daytime and primetime hours. They have also become more
specialized, as programs differentiate themselves by focusing on specific populations and needs. The
interventions are now more likely to take place outside the TV studio, with professional helpers going
"on location" and portable cameras documenting the results. Most importantly, TV's foray into the
helping culture is now more intensely aligned with the rationalities of deregulation and welfare
reform. Within the context of the search for new ways to deliver social services, its interventions can
be sanctioned as providing a public service in ways that Queen for a Day and other precursors were
not.

Illustration 1.1 Queen for a Day brought charity to TV in the 1950s, but was panned by critics as
tasteless and exploitative (ABC, 1956-60; NBC, 1960-4; creator and producer Edward Kranyak)
Television, especially in the United States, is not required to do much more than maximize profit. The
notion that it must serve something called the public interest has been more or less obliterated by
deregulatory policies. As Michael Eisner, former CEO of the Disney Corporation, which owns ABC
Television, stated bluntly in 1998, "We have no obligation to make history; we have no obligation to
make art; we have no obligation to make a statement; to make money is our only objective."
Nonetheless, Stephen McPherson, president of ABC's entertainment division, now contends that
television is more than a "toaster with pictures," as famously claimed by Mark Fowler, chairman of
the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under Ronald Reagan. Although Miracle Workers
was being packaged and sold as entertainment, McPherson played up its charitable and educational
contributions to The Tinies, insisting that "whatever the rating," ABC had done a good thing by
providing "knowledge and access" to unfortunate people who lack the "wherewithal to get the best
treatment" on their own.
McPherson did not dwell on how quickly ABC would pull the plug in the event of a less-than-desired
rating or other business factors: such is the fate of all television produced within the operating logic
of the market. Instead, he emphasized the ethical possibilities of cultural commerce, particularly TV's
capacity to mobilize private resources (money, volunteerism, expertise) in order to help needy
individuals overcome hurdles and hardships. When joined to the conventions of reality entertainment,
this enterprising and personalized approach to social problem solving allows television to do good
without providing unprofitable "serious" news and public affairs programming.' However, critics
who fault TV for failing to provide substantial journalistic attention to health-care policy, poverty,
homelessness, public-sector downsizing, and similar issues also fail to fully grasp the significance of
charity programs built around the "empowerment" of people whose everyday lives are clearly
impacted by these issues. TV's relationship to the "public interest" has been severed from the ideal of

preparing the masses for the formalized rituals (deliberation, voting) of democracy and linked to a
"can-do" model of citizenship that values private enterprise, personal responsibility, and selfempowerment - the basic principles of George W. Bush's Ownership Society. Instead of rejecting any
allegiance to the public good, as many predicted would occur with broadcast deregulation, TV has
quite aggressively pursued a form of civic engagement that enacts the reinvention of government. As
we will demonstrate, for-profit TV programs like Miracle Workers have proliferated alongside the
proposition that State involvement in the care of citizens is inefficient, paternalistic, and
"dependency-breeding" and the related imperative that citizens take their care into their own hands.
McPherson's self-congratulatory praise for television's recent efforts to tap the resources of the
private sector and help individuals navigate a plethora of consumer choices and make sound
decisions about their well-being speaks to the affinity between deregulated public interest activity
and contemporary welfare reform.
From "Welfare State to Opportunity, Inc."
To understand the political rationality of reality-based charity TV, a brief detour through the
conceptual history of welfare will be helpful. We take our bearings partly from political theorist
Nikolas Rose, who situates the changing "mentalities" of government leading up to welfare reform
within stages of liberalism.' According to Rose's account, the liberal state was called upon to become
more directly involved in the care of citizens in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a
period of time that happens to correspond with the development and progression of industrial
capitalism. As relations among elites and workers became increasingly antagonistic, rulers were
"urged to accept the obligation to tame and govern the undesirable consequences of industrial life,
wage labor and urban existence in the name of society.i4 What Rose calls a "state of welfare"
emerged to provide basic forms of social insurance, child welfare, health, mental hygiene, universal
education, and similar services that both "civilized" the working class and joined citizens to the State
and to each other through formalized "solidarities and dependencies." Through this new "social
contract" between the State and the population, Rose contends, the autonomous political subject of
liberal rule was reconstituted as a "citizen with rights to social protection and social education in
return for duties of social obligation and social responsibility. "s
In the United States, where faith in the market's ability to regulate society is especially strong, the
1930s and the 1960s stand out as key moments in the "state of welfare." The depression of the 1930s
spawned a crisis of capitalism that required federal intervention to buffer. New Deal reforms
signaled a new way of conceptualizing the State's responsibility to "protect citizens from the
vicissitudes of life."`' Two types of federal welfare programs were created: national insurance
programs to manage the collective risks of unemployment, old age, disability, and catastrophic
illness, and need-based public assistance programs. In the 196()s, these programs were expanded in
the name of the War on Poverty and the Great Society, extending the promise of "social protection and
social education" while also bringing socially and economically oppressed populations further into
the disciplinary arena of the public agencies responsible for overseeing their welfare.
As Rose and others have shown, the revised social contract inherent to a "state of welfare" has been

contested since its inception. In the 1970s, however, the critique began to escalate, as critics across
the political spectrum charged the Welfare State with fiscal waste and limiting "individual freedom,
personal choice, self-fulfillment, and initiative."' In the United States, need-based programs were
especially vilified, but more recently even those popular social insurance programs (such as social
security) that escape stigma have been targeted for privatization in the name of efficiency, choice, and
empowerment. As this rationale suggests, "undoing" welfare involves more than rolling back the
Welfare State - it also entails enacting market-based strategies of governing and reconstituting
citizenship as the "free exercise" of choice and responsibility.' This occurred in the 1990s. As Lisa
Duggan argues, the push to "de-statize" welfare was disarticulated to some extent at this point from
punitive, and overtly racist and sexist characterization of welfare "cheats" and "freeloaders" that had
gained currency in the Reagan era. Instead, the basis for welfare reform was tied to a promise of
empowerment through self-help.' The justification for imposing strict time limits on welfare benefits
and implementing welfare-to-work policies was to enable people caught in a state of dependency to
"help themselves," claimed politicians. As this was occurring, social service provision in general
was also being outsourced and privatized: "In one policy domain after another - pensions, education,
transportation, criminal justice, and environmental protection to name a few examples - we are
moving away from having governmental agencies actually delivering services toward service
delivery by private firms," observed one analyst of the move from "Welfare State to Opportunity,
Inc.":10
The American Welfare State is not dead yet, but it is fading away. Its replacement, Opportunity, Inc.,
seems to be growing brighter by the day. These two forms of governance, Welfare State and
Opportunity Inc., differ in their methods, goals, and not the least, rhetoric. The Welfare State delivers
benefits to recipients in order to cushion them from the harshness of markets. Opportunity, Inc., in
contrast, seeks to assist clients in becoming independent actors within markets. The Welfare State is
not inherently provided by the government, nor is Opportunity, Inc., provided by the private sector.
As part of the Welfare State, private firms can simply deliver benefits. Opportunity, Inc., does not
intrinsically consist of private forms. Government agencies, too, can act to empower citizens to
become economically independent. However, the transition from Welfare State to Opportunity, Inc.
often does, in fact, involve the transfer of responsibility for social service delivery from
governmental agencies to private firms. Federal, state, and local governments are all creating publicprivate partnerships (most often, through contracts) to operate social welfare functions; as measured
by the numbers of partnerships, services and dollars, these efforts are growing."
Since taking office in 2000, George W. Bush has further cut federal funding for public housing, food
stamps, energy assistance, and most other need-based welfare programs. He reauthorized welfare
reform law of 1996 (which ended welfare as a federal "entitlement") and increased the time
restrictions and work requirements imposed by the original legislation so as to "empower" people by
moving them "off welfare rolls." Bush has also promoted marriage as a component of welfare reform,
arguing that "stable families should be the central goal of American welfare policy," and allocating a
significant portion of his welfare budget to programs (outsourced to private firms) that encourage
marriage between low-income couples. He has promoted private and personal responsibility as the
twin bedrocks of post-welfare society, telling TV viewers during his inaugural address: "What you do

is as important as anything government does." Bush has promoted the further privatization of public
services and has sought to develop "armies of compassion" to address lingering social needs. He
established the USA Freedom Corps to promote volunteerism as a solution to problems ranging from
illiteracy to poverty, and a President's Council on National and Community Service comprising
leaders from business, entertainment, sports, nonprofit agencies, education, and the media to cultivate
a private ethic of "service and responsibility."
The White House's reliance on "partnerships" with the private sector, including the culture industries,
to accomplish welfare reform also speaks to the advancement of liberalism. Thomas Streeter has
shown how the corporate sector has always played a high-profile role in government in the United
States (including broadcast policy), to the point where "corporate liberalism" is a more accurate
description of liberalism as it developed in the country.12 However, we are seeing a new twist on
this, in that government is increasingly expected not only to embrace corporatism, but to be itself
revenue-generating. Advanced or "neo" liberalism entrusts the market to improve upon the Welfare
State by "relocating" its focus on governing through social service within the realms of commerce and
consumption. Such is the reasoning, we contend, that currently informs reality TV's do-good trend.
While enterprising helping ventures like Miracle Workers warrant critique, the leftist tendency to
dismiss them as manipulative - for creating a sense of "false consciousness that things are being taken
care of" in the absence of the Welfare State, in the words of one critic - doesn't take us very far. We
can't understand TV as a technology of governing by comparing representation to "reality" or
evaluating the political effectivity of texts. Charity TV is ultimately about a thoroughly commercial
medium's move into new social roles and relationships than it is about ideological positioning in any
simple sense. To create Miracle Workers, for example, TV producers formed alliances with patientsupport groups, hospitals, and health-care professionals, and through these private associations
became involved in the social work (screening, evaluating, outreach, testing, counseling) of the
medical establishment. In determining eligibility of need and administering the flow of care to
"deserving" cases, television took over the role of institutionalized charity and, later, public welfare
office. By distributing the surplus of capitalism in the manner of its choosing, it advanced a corporate
liberal governing strategy that can be traced to the tax-sheltered philanthropies of robber-baron
industrial capitalists. The difference between the charity work underwritten by the Carnegie
Corporation and other industrial giants and today's TV interventionism is that television has situated
the power to shape social life through philanthropy entirely within the logic of the commercial
market: There's no distinction - and no presumed need for one - between do-good activity and the
manufacture and sale of cultural product. Finally, television facilitated solutions to needs that might
once have been addressed by the State with "efficiency" and costcutting zeal, implementing extreme
versions of risk-management strategies practiced by HMOs and private insurance carriers (only those
surgeries with at least a 90 percent success rate were considered for funding by the TV program).
Our aim here is not to mythologize the state of welfare, but to show how TV is working to produce
substitutes for it that require analysis on their own terms. It is not a stretch to suggest that reality TV
now offers what passes as welfare, and if this is the case we must come to terms with its productive
strategies as well as its limitations. While we situate this development within the move to reinvent
government, we don't wish to overstate the break from the past, for residual and emerging techniques

of governing converge and sometimes collide in TV's charity productions. As John Clarke reminds us,
welfare states have historically been deeply contradictory, involved in the "management and
regulation" of subordinated populations as well as the provision of services. Moreover, as Rose
argues, their success in "implanting in citizens the aspiration to pursue their own civility, well-being
and advancement" is what makes newer market-based strategies of governing possible.13 Reality
TV's foray into privatized forms of social service demonstrates this complexity.
Programs like Miracle Workers enact templates for self-empowerment as well as commercial
alternatives to the provision of social services, but they also draw in part from public welfare's
relationship with needy subjects. Because the recipients of TV's concerns are not conceived of as
entirely self-sufficient citizens, their capacity to govern themselves through their freedom is subject to
question. This uncertainty manifests itself in numerous ways, from the rules and instructions circulated
to applicants to a programmatic reliance on surveillance and close supervisory relationships. Reality
TV does not acknowledge inequalities of class, gender, and race and cannot explain neediness in such
terms. While much is made of the tragic circumstances that lead individuals to television for help, it
therefore cannot completely escape the lineage of disciplinary techniques long deployed by charity
workers, social workers, and welfare case managers in their bureaucratic relations with needy
subjects.
Reality TV modifies these residual techniques, however, by bringing social service into the market
and linking its execution to consumer choices, from what TV show to watch and what products to
consume, to what volunteer opportunity to pursue and what cause to support. In this sense, it enacts a
governing strategy that, as Wendy Brown contends in her critique of neoliberalism, "involves
extending and disseminating market values to all institutions and social action.i14 We might even say
that reality TV "neoliberalizes" social welfare by managing all conceivable human problems and
needs from the vantage point of cultural commerce. Rather than merely lamenting this as evidence of
capitalism's further encroachment, we now turn our attention to exactly how television manages
neediness. As we will show, do-good TV does not hide the "truth" about the changing state of welfare
as much as it literally reconstitutes it as a new and improved product of private initiative.
ABC TV: Governing "Better" Communities
Two strands of reality TV have been institutionally positioned as performing a public service in
addition to entertaining audiences and making money for shareholders: charity programs and life
interventions. Charity programs focus on helping needy people turn their lives around by providing
material necessities such as housing (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Mobile Home Disasters),
transportation (Pimp My Ride), food (Random One), and medical care (Miracle Workers, Three
Wishes). Life interventions focus on helping the needy by teaching them how to manage and care for
themselves and their families properly. The distinction can be blurry, since TV's offers of material
help are almost always accompanied by some type of life coaching, therapy, or professional advice,
and life-changing ventures often involve cash prizes, giveaways, product placements, and other
commercial rewards in addition to the provision of counseling, training, and expertise. We will
examine life interventions in the next chapter, while focusing here on charity TV's contribution to the

privatization of care and the mobilization of compassion.

The ABC network has played a pivotal role in revitalizing and updating charity TV, and has
established the basic cultural template for addressing material needs within the intersecting logics of
cultural commerce and welfare reform. The template works like this: TV aims to fix a specific
problem or hardship on behalf of an individual or family. It does not do this alone, but works with an
alliance of corporate sponsors, donors, experts, skilled laborers, nonprofit agencies, and TV viewers.
TV plays the pivotal administrative and "outreach" roles, determining instances of need, orchestrating
the interventions, tapping into existing resources for accomplishing them, and documenting the
progression of needy subjects from "before" to "after."
Behind the scenes, the Disney Corporation, ABC's parent company, is a member of the intersecting
public-private partnerships and alliances that are working to accomplish the "reinvention of
government." Disney was a corporate sponsor of the 2005 meeting of the National Conference on
Volunteering and Service, which was organized by the Corporation for National Community Service,
the Points of Light Foundation, and the USA Freedom Corps, a national volunteer network established
by George W. Bush. At the conference, leaders from the public and corporate sectors met to strategize
how to develop "volunteer service" (a term used to describe everything from corporate giving to bake
sales) to meet America's "pressing social needs." The role of corporate and personal responsibility
was made clear by the keynote speeches: US Department of Health and Human Services Secretary
Mike Leavitt lectured on the importance of "economic goodness" (a term for compassionate
capitalism) and the closing remarks were delivered by Mark Victor Hansen, bestselling author of the
selfhelp book Chicken Soup for the Soul. It is telling, but not surprising that popular media figured so
prominently, for as Rose and others point out, cultural technologies (such as self-help books) that
promise to "empower" individuals become more relevant to practices of citizenship as the State
reconfigures its governing capacities and caring responsibilities.
ABC's Better Community Outreach Program is an example. Developed in 2005 under the direction of
ABC's McPherson, the Better Community program has a mission of using television to cultivate
compassion, volunteerism, and learning in American life - terminology similar to the rhetoric used by
Bush and other reformers. The venture is entirely voluntary on the part of ABC, which is no longer
required to serve something called the "public interest" as defined and overseen by formal regulators.
Rejecting the historical connection between television that serves the public and serious
news/information, the Better Community program approaches its outreach goals through popular
entertainment, including soap operas, sitcoms and, especially, reality programs. Through its
programming and web activities, ABC also aims to bring "pro-social messages" to TV viewers in the
service of "empowering" them to learn about the causes that ABC supports. Viewers are asked to
participate in an ethical agenda that ABC has determined for them, and to fulfill their civic
responsibilities by serving as volunteers in related causes. The public interest is more or less
identical to ABC/Disney's corporate aims, as explained on the Disney web site:
ABC Corporate Initiatives oversees community outreach for the ABC Television Network. Through
programming, events and promotions, it identifies and facilitates opportunities that serve ABC's
corporate objectives and responsibilities as a corporate citizen. Branded under ABC's A Better

Community, all efforts follow a mission to utilize the reach and influence of the media to establish
effective community outreach initiatives that serve the public interest, inform and inspire.15
The purpose of the Better Community "brand" in relation to the aims of charity TV as a whole is to
publicize ABC's role in the mobilization of resources to look after the needy through organizations the
TV network did not establish, but that it aligns itself with and acts upon. ABC refers to its
relationship with these organizations, which include Habitat for Humanity, Points of Light Foundation,
National Center for Healthy Housing, and the Better Business Bureau, as "partnerships." In 2005,
ABC situated Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which debuted the previous year, as its most visible
cultural contribution to "community outreach" and began referring to Sears and other Home Edition
sponsors as full-fledged "partners" of the Better Community brand. ABC emphasizes the charitable
dimensions of Home Edition on air and on the Better Community web site, and uses the program to
direct TV viewers to resources (including Sears stores, the Sears American Dream charity, partner
organizations, and the Better Community web site) for actualizing their own compassion/personal
responsibility. So integrated are television programming, commerce, charity, and volunteerism that
ABC does not even refer to Home Edition as a TV program in the old sense of broadcast media. On
the Better Community web site, the series is also called a "partner" of the ABC Better Community
brand, a term that refers not only to its institutional connections but to Home Edition's mission of
networking to build a "better community, one family, one house, one donation at a time."
Because Horne Edition set important precedents for the current wave of charity TV it is worth
examining its charitable logic in some detail. According to ABC, Horne Edition currently receives
over 15,000 applications each week from families seeking to improve their housing situations in some
way or another. Each season, approximately one dozen are offered home makeovers that are
completed in seven days. TV viewers are informed of the chosen family's special needs and attributes
as the Home Edition bus wheels into their town to surprise the winning candidates. Their run-down
houses are transformed on camera in a "race against time" carried out by a cast of technical experts
(architects, stylists, and designers) and a revolving crew of local contractors and construction
workers. The narrative suspense hinges on whether or not the team can complete the renovation in
time. They always do, proving time and again the program's ability to "transform lives" with a degree
of efficiency and speed only the private sector can provide. According to ABC, the transformation of
the houses is ultimately a mere catalyst for improving the tragic lives of the residents who live in
them. This emotional payoff occurs during the "reveal," when the displaced residents return from a
complimentary vacation to Disney World to witness the "unbelievable transformation of the house"
and viewers come to understand how the TV crew has "impacted the lives of the deserving families."
The goodwill gesture doesn't cost ABC anything. With high ratings, Home Edition is a proven
moneymaker. Local businesses and builders are solicited to donate services and materials while
corporate sponsors such as Sears and Ford provide household appliances, vehicles, and decorative
touches. In a recent essay, John McMurria takes issue with Home Edition's integrated corporate
sponsorship deals, noting that the program is essentially an hour-long product placement for Sears and
other companies. McMurria contends that commerce has compromised Homc Edition's "good
Samaritanism" and suggests that in noncommercial hands it would be a better, more authentic example
of public service. McMurria is suggesting that the hero of the program be changed from the corporate

sector to the public sector, so that the emotional high associated with Home Edition can be mobilized
for socialism. " While we sympathize with these concerns, the traditional leftist perspective orienting
McMurria's analysis is ultimately limited in its capacity to grapple with the complexities of
governmental power. Replacing corporate sponsors with public agencies may indeed produce a
different TV show - but that show would be linked to another history of governmental relations, as
Rose and Clarke remind us in their caution against romanticizing the complicated history of the
Welfare State. Horne Edition's ability to fold the legacy of charity as a pre-welfare strategy of
managing neediness into cultural enterprise is what makes it an actualized example of the "political
rationality" that presently shapes welfare reform. Besides calling upon the private sector to resolve
needs, Horne Edition promotes the particular behaviors and forms of conduct that emerge from this
political rationality, including homeownership, self-sufficiency, entrepreneurialism, and
volunteerism. The program does not simply "encode" these activities ideologically; it demonstrates
them, enacts them, and directs TV viewers to a range of resources for accomplishing them on their
own. This "can-do" approach to the privatization of public service is not without contradictions, but it
does require a different conceptual focus than has typically guided television studies.
TV Outreach and the Ownership Society
The premise of Home Edition hinges on the unavailability of welfare as an entitlement. However, the
program's credibility rests on the idea that the alternative to the Welfare State - private do-goodism is reasonable and fair. This can be tricky, given the tension between the extent to which many people
in the United States apparently feel unable to care for themselves (hence the large volume of
applications received) and the fact that ABC will ultimately turn most of them away. One way the
tension is minimized from the outset is through a focus on homeowners and an exclusion of apartment
dwellers, including residents of public housing and Section Eight facilities. The houses may be small,
run-down, sparsely furnished, and/or on the brink of foreclosure, but they nonetheless exist as
symbols of the socalled Ownership Society. By establishing this basic program rule, Home Edition
does not have to deal with the factors that prevent many Americans from achieving homeownership.
The programmatic focus on homeowners serves another role as well, in that it provides the basis for
promoting home ownership as a foundation for executing personal responsibility and therefore good
citizenship. Home Edition is not explicitly positioned in relation to housing policy reforms such as
reduced federal spending on public housing and shakeups (including a greater role for faith-based
charities) at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Nor does it directly promote
George Bush's American Dream program, which siphons funding away from public housing services
to promote homeownership in low-income populations through (limited) forms of down-payment
assistance as well as homeownership education and training programs. Home Edition does, however,
present homeownership as an appropriate accomplishment that distinguishes the worthy poor from
welfare recipients still caught in a cycle of dependency on the State. In the following episode
summary from the ABC web site, we can see how Home Edition simultaneously makes extreme
socioeconomic hardship visible and erases the public sector as a viable or desirable resource for the
needy. At the same time, it finds human agency and hope in a woman's personal responsibility as a
mother, which is evident from her heroic efforts and sacrifices to provide her children with a

privately owned home (however small and brokendown). The fact that she has obtained this symbol
of the Ownership Society through her own work and ambition is precisely what qualifies this woman
for Home Edition's attention. She is classified as worthy of help because she exemplifies the path to
freedom and selfempowerment emphasized by neoliberal policies and discourses:
Veronica and her family have had a life of adversity and struggle. Having bought the first and only
home she could afford, Veronica raises her eight children - including two sets of twins - in a home
that would be cramped for a family of four, let alone nine. A strong woman, she is determined to raise
her children in a safe and loving home, keeping them off the streets and away from violence for good.
But the house isn't much of a safe haven. The extremely hazardous Ginyard home has exposed live
wires sticking out of the drywall, mold from constant flooding in their basement and holes in the walls
and ceilings. The kids have to sleep in makeshift bedrooms in the basement and the attic. Veronica
works two jobs just to make ends meet and uses public transportation to travel to and from work, as
her run-down car sits in the driveway. The house, the struggle to pay the bills and the years of stress
has taken a toll on her, but despite everything, this hard-working single mom is determined to provide
the best life for her family."
The aim of instilling the practice of homeownership is taken up more explicitly by the Sears
American Dream Campaign, Home Edition's principal do-good partner. Both the TV program and the
ABC Better Community web site direct TV viewers to this campaign, which is described as a
"community commitment" to help people "maintain and outfit their homes and families" by providing
financial assistance as well as educational programs. According to Sears, homeownership is not only
about having a place to live or even achieving a desirable lifestyle. Along with organized religion
and the family, it is also a mechanism for minimizing social and material problems, from criminality
to financial stress. In this sense, homeownership is positioned as a technique for performing one's
civic obligations within what Rose calls the "new regime of the actively responsible self." Rose
argues individuals are now expected to fulfill their duties as citizens by taking care of and actualizing
themselves, first and foremost. The American Dream campaign situates owning a home as one way of
doing this:
Did you know that in communities where home ownership is common, children excel in school and
adults are more likely to be involved in their communities by voting, volunteering and attending
religious services? Additionally, where home ownership increases, crime declines and businesses
thrive. That's why the Sears American Dream Campaign is not only helping American families
achieve and preserve their American Dreams, it is helping to strengthen the fabric of our coYninunities ... Homes are the foundation of our families, neighborhoods and nation. Home equity creates
wealth for low- and middle-income families. It's easy to see that increasing home ownership and
maintenance may be the single most effective way to fortify the foundation of our country. 18
The Sears American Dream campaign web site links the governing rationalities of privatization and
personal responsibility to consumer training and the sale of Sears home merchandise. Through a
partnership with NeighborWorks, a nonprofit agency created by the US Congress to "revitalize
communities through affordable housing opportunities, training and technical assistance," the Sears
American Dream web site offers practical tips for affording a home and taking care of it properly

once that goal has been accomplished. The section "Get in Shape with Financial Fitness" educates
low-income people on how to obtain a home, focusing on personal behaviors such as "create a
financial goal with a timeline," "establish a budget and stick to it," "control your wants and focus on
your needs," and "find a trusted financial advisor." Having evoked irresponsible choices and
irrational consumption as the cause of financial difficulties, the web site then teaches people how to
become responsible consumers of the homerelated products sold in Sears stores. This consumer
training is presented, alongside the "financial fitness" advice on homeownership, as another
dimension of "community outreach": "Now that you've got your house, you need to transform it into a
home, which means making lots of decisions about appliances and decor," explains the section on
"Home Maintenance," which directs users to printable checklists to help them "get into the habit" of
taking care of houses (including lawns), as well as specific techniques for "choosing" appliances and
other accoutrements. As the web site explains:
It takes a lot of work to outfit and maintain a home and family. For homeowners, especially for those
struggling to make ends meet, an ounce of prevention is definitely worth a pound of cure. That's why
the Sears American Dream Campaign is educating low- and moderateincome families nationwide
about the importance of home maintenance. It's just one way the Sears American Dream Campaign is
strengthening communities one home at a time.
Casting Needy Individuals
Another way that Horne Edition narrows the pool of applicants is by choosing families with "unique
and extraordinary" situations. Public welfare programs rely on measurable and verifiable data (i.e.,
income, hours worked, marital status, number of children, time on welfare) to determine eligibility of
need; all applicants who meet these "objective" requirements are entitled to benefits (presuming such
benefits exist). Home Edition, on the other hand, helps only a small number of families: "We can't
help everyone, even though we wish that we could," explains the program of its limited capacity to
manage unmet housing needs. The lucky few are selected by the casting department, which raises the
important question: What does it mean when a process that has historically been carried out by social
service professionals is turned over to commercial entertainment agents? The ABC web site solicits
applications to Home Edition on the basis of two criteria - having a home that "desperately needs
attention" and having a "compelling story to tell." However, the program's much more narrow focus
on personal "tragedies and traumas" was confirmed by an internal 2005 ABC memo obtained by the
Smoking Gun, an investigative web site. Sent to local ABC affiliates, it described a list of the
specific "tragedies" it hoped to feature on upcoming episodes of Home Edition, from a child killed by
a drunk driver to muscular dystrophy, and urged local station personnel to look for such cases in their
areas. This is not surprising, since previous seasons of Home Edition have also emphasized families
coping with childhood illnesses and chronic diseases. The debut episode set the stage by renovating
the home of a working-class family whose small daughter was recovering from leukemia. This search
for personal trauma is rooted in the economic interests of ABC in that its casting professionals search
for stories with the emotional impact to produce high ratings and therefore profitability. However, it
also works as a device for determining eligibility of need and classifying the "worthy" poor.

Attempted self-sufficiency and an ethic of volunteerism also determine which families are selected,
maintains executive producer Tom Forman:
We look for people who deserve it. It's tough to judge. It's people who have given their whole lives
and suddenly find themselves in a situation where they need a little help. Most of the families we end
up doing are nominations. The kinds of families we're looking for don't say, "Gee, I need help."
They're quietly trying to solve their problems themselves and it's a neighbor or a coworker who
submits an application on their behalf.
By rewarding those who struggle without expecting or asking for help, Home Edition discourages
what reformers call "dependency." At the same time, it positively singles out people who demonstrate
personal responsibility to others. Low-paid public employees who protect the United States from
external and internal threats - including military personnel, police officers, and firefighters - appear
often. Usually, such recipients have fallen into financial insecurity because of an illness or other
unforeseen circumstance. In one episode, a national guardsman whose family suffered greatly
financially when he was called up for active duty in Iraq was presented with a home renovation.
Typifying how official government (in this case the military) not only cooperates with but also
facilitates the privatization of care through TV, the soldier was flown home for an unscheduled visit
to view the final reveal, and various military agencies promoted the episode on their web sites.

Illustration 1.2 Families must sell themselves as worthy and needy in their application videos. In this
episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, a minister "devoted to community service," his wife,
and his three daughters request the program's help with a crumbling pavement and other problems they
cannot afford to fix (Endemol Entertainment USA and Lock & Key Productions for ABC, 2005)
Individuals who take up duties of the Welfare State within the context of their personal lives are often
rewarded for doing so by Home Edition. Social workers who adopt large numbers of homeless
and/or chronically ill children and struggle financially to care for them on their own modest salaries
have appeared on several episodes as personifications of the "compassionate citizenship" promoted
by the Bush administration. In a related episode, a poverty-stricken woman who had "turned her own
life around" was operating a small nonprofit charity out of her home. The mission of Sadie Holmes
Help Services, Inc. was to help other poor people in the woman's low-income community by
providing them with donated food, clothing, and furniture. When the donations overtook the woman's
small house, according to ABC, she moved her family into a rented apartment. When the house was
badly damaged by a hurricane and a subsequent fire, her homeowner's insurance was cancelled, and
she was unable to afford the needed repairs. She nonetheless managed to continue operating the
charity out of the now dilapidated home, while her family made do in the small apartment. The

woman was rewarded by Hone Edition with a brand new home, not only because her own house was
beyond repair but because she exemplified the political value placed on individuals who, despite
their own disadvantages, are devoted to an individualized ethic of compassion and responsibility.
Taking welfare quite literally into her own hands, this woman not only overcame her own dependency
but channeled her own limited resources (her unpaid labor, the house) into services the public sector
no longer wishes to provide.
While the needy families who appear on Home Editions are revered as decent citizens whose pitiable
circumstances are mainly due to extraordinary bad luck, their neediness nonetheless prevents them
from playing an active role in the transformation of their home. There is a contradiction between the
claim of using the market to empower people and the fact that they are not really allowed to exercise
their "freedom of choice," to use the terminology of neoliberal reformers. Home Edition's
professional experts decide what physical and cosmetic changes to make to the house without
consulting the family members and, in the process, assume paternalistic authority over them. Although
this paternalistic relationship is cloaked in kindness it constitutes a hierarchy of freedom and authority
nonetheless. Behind the scenes, Home Edition's address to potential candidates is much more
authoritarian. The application process incorporates a history of regulating, monitoring, and
controlling welfare recipients, as documented by Linda Gordon, John Gilliom, and other historians.19
To be considered, individuals must answer questions about household income, education level,
existing debt and involvement in lawsuits, and prior conviction of a crime, whether as "simple as a
driving violation or as serious as armed robbery." They are not trusted to tell the truth about this last
question in particular, and so are warned: "Be honest: We will find out sooner or later through our
comprehensive background checks." The applicants must also agree to provide three years' worth of
official tax records to prove their answers to the above questions if they are selected. While enacted
as a private alternative to welfare, Home Edition collects, evaluates, and stores the same information
gathered by public welfare offices (even if it does not guarantee "benefits" as a result). It presumes
that people who ask for help are more prone than middleclass people to criminality and dishonesty
and that they have no inherent right to privacy. Because of this, they can be governed in much harsher
ways (i.e., subjected to background checks and verification technologies) than the liberal ideal of
"governing through freedom" would suggest. Home Edition's purpose is not only to govern needy
people but also to ensure its own profitability. The impetus to weed out individuals who might be
discovered to be amoral or unworthy is also about protecting the Home Edition brand.
There is another way that Horne Edition resonates with welfare reform discourse, and that is by
illustrating and rewarding enterprising activity among the needy. An example here is an episode
featuring the African-American Kirkwood family of Port Orchard, Washington. The family applied to
Home Edition when they found themselves living with exposed wiring, open walls, and poor
ventilation caused by a failed home-remodeling project. Their main concern was a toxic black mold
creeping over their floors and walls, which eventually forced the parents and their five children to
move into a crowded motel room. The case fit the criteria for Home Edition in that the Kirkwoods'
story was not only dramatic but also life-threatening: "Their house was making them sick ... their
dream - to get back in." The family documented the situation (including the oozing mold) using homevideo equipment and concluded their tape with the plea: "ABC: please do something." However,

more than a year passed and nothing was heard from the TV network. According to the Home Edition
application, this non-response is typical: "Due to the volume of applications received," families are
never contacted unless they are chosen to appear on the program. Eventually, Home Edition did take
up the Kirkwoods' case in a two-hour episode that addressed the family's struggle to get onto the TV
program, and thus offers some insights into the selection process. In the explanation for the "special"
nature of this episode, viewers are introduced to 11-year-old Jael Kirkwood, who not only filed the
application but also used her ingenuity to get the family on the air. While Jael admits to having been
devastated when she didn't hear back, much is made of the fact that she didn't take no for an answer.
The girl began telephoning Home Edition's casting department on a daily basis and contacted families
from past episodes for their advice on getting the attention of producers. She also visited the mayor of
Port Orchard, who contacted Home Edition on her behalf, and who was praised on camera as the
right sort of public official who goes the extra mile for her constituents, not by directing them to local
care resources but by getting their case accepted by national television. However, Jael's "sheer
determination" is said to be the deciding factor. While the arguments for welfare reform are never
explicitly stated in the episode, Jael's precocious drive to take responsibility for her needy family by
mobilizing every resource at her disposal is rewarded against an implied counter-image of the
stereotypical welfare recipient who must learn not to passively cling to government "entitlements."
This image is historically coded in racial and gender terms, despite the move away from explicit
stereotyping in neoliberal discourse.
Welfare recipients, as Martin Gilens and others have shown, have long been conceptualized within
political and popular discourse as lazy, dishonest, helpless, and unmotivated.20 While neoliberal
policies officially minimize these stereotypical associations, they lurk within the rationalities of
welfare reform and reappear in television's attempt to manage neediness. Black Americans are even
more likely to be constructed this way, given the intersection of economic and racial
disenfranchisement in the United States. The role of the mother in the reproduction of welfare
"dependency" comes into play in this discourse as well, in that the figure of the black, unmarried
welfare mother has come to stand for the negative connotations of need-based welfare programs,
particularly their cyclical nature. Jael's turn to Home Edition for help is differentiated from this
representational legacy and situated within the proactive, self-enterprising activities that make up
"good citizenship" according to neoliberal regimes. As Home Edition explained, it was "the tenacity
of one girl" (and implicitly not a formalized system of rights and responsibilities) that got the family
the "home they deserve." At the end of the episode, the camera lingers on a group of neighbors
gathered outside the Kirkwood house, mingling with the family members, the masses of anonymous
workers and volunteers, and the Home Edition cast, while the musical theme "We'll Make it Through"
plays in the background. The scenario draws from a nostalgic image of community cooperation
(agrarian barn-raising rituals come to mind), but the long list of sponsors/partners that follow affirms
that without television's involvement the Kirkwoods would be nowhere: It was TV that recognized
and rewarded Jael's enterprising skills, and it was TV that mustered the private resources for the
intervention and administered the flow of care.
Self-enterprise is required of people who wish to appear on Home Edition as needy families. While
applicants are addressed as potential criminals, they are also advised to be enterprising, to work hard

to "sell themselves" to the producers and potential audiences on camera. Because the individuals who
apply for help are not presumed to possess the know-how to sell themselves on their own, detailed
instructions are provided. In addition to answering socioeconomic questions and signing legal
documents, would-be families are required to produce a video narrative (borrow a camera if you
don't have one, instructs Home Edition). They are guided in this process by a complete shot list, tips
for handling the camera properly (no zooms allowed), and a sample script. The videos must follow
certain conventions established by Home Edition to solicit viewer empathy, including having children
give the guided tour of their own rooms (if they have one) and filming the entire family outside the
home for an introduction that incorporates the scripted line "Hi, ABC, We're the Family (big waves
and smiles and lots of energy.)" Successful applicants must follow these guidelines, a requirement
that puts ABC in a position of cultural power while also making the production of Home Edition more
cost-efficient (the free home videos are used to introduce the families). All members of the household
are required not only to appear in the video but to sell their stories to a potential TV audience of
millions: "We understand that talking about your situation can be difficult but please do not hold back
and PLEASE don't turn off the camera if you feel emotional." They are also instructed to make
themselves "camera ready" and are presented with tips on personal grooming and wardrobe choices:
"Please know that IF you are selected for the show this tape could be used on television so make sure
appearances are fit for TV! Ladies, please take the time to put on light makeup and do your hair. You
should dress as if you were going out for a family dinner or nice lunch," advises the application.
Privatizing Care, Mobilizing Compassion
Home Edition's affinity to the neoliberalization of welfare and the privatization of social services
was clarified by a number of "After the Storm" episodes devoted to helping communities affected by
Hurricane Katrina. Because the devastation of an entire geographic region was at stake and thousands
of families qualified as "exceptionally needy and deserving," the program could not rely on its usual
strategies of selection. The new aim was to undertake relief efforts that "would benefit more than one
family." This did not mean channeling resources into state and municipal governments: any role of the
public sector in both preventing and resolving the crisis was eradicated by these episodes. Instead,
the Home Edition team channeled energy and resources into assisting local nongovernmental private
relief efforts such as a privately funded lowincome health clinic that was displaced by the storm and
was operating out of a double-wide trailer, and a hard-hit New Orleans church that doubled as a local
charity for homeless people.
Other strategies for helping Katrina victims were tied to cultural commerce, such as sending busloads
of displaced families who lost everything in the disaster on a complimentary $250 shopping spree at
Sears. Besides demonstrating the urgency of restoring private, nongovernmental, and faith-based
charities to their full operating capacities, storylines stressed the role of both corporate goodwill
(Sears and its American Dream campaign played a prominent role in all of the revitalization efforts)
and individual consumption to the restoration of normalcy. When Laura Bush agreed to appear in a
cameo on one of the special Katrina episodes, Home Edition's relationship to welfare was made
explicit: On the White House's official web site, Bush said she went to the filming to discuss the
importance of "partnerships," from the Sears truck filled with donated goods to volunteer medical

workers to the Army Corps of Engineers. "This is what it's going to take ... partnerships between
governments, between corporations, between individuals, faith-based groups to make sure all of these
people will really be able to rebuild their lives." The Los Angeles Times put it more bluntly,
explaining that "Mrs. Bush's spokeswoman saw a conservative message in the show's usual story line:
the private sector doing good work, rather than waiting around for the federal government to do it.
That, she said, was what the First Lady wanted to endorse."
The private sector enlisted by Home Edition to manage the lingering needs of a post-welfare society
is not limited to corporations and businesses: it also includes "armies" of individuals who are called
upon to voluntarily donate their time and personal resources to the care of the less fortunate. At the
end of each episode, Home Edition host Ty Pennington also encourages the audience to log onto the
ABC Better Community web site, where ABC talent quote Martin Luther King, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Walt Disney, and other well-known figures in streaming public service announcements that
extol volunteerism as civic obligation (the announcements are also broadcast on television). TV
viewers are encouraged to take steps toward fulfilling this obligation by seeking out the organizations
and charities featured on the web site - including nongovernmental housing agencies such as Habitat
for Humanity and Home Aid and the Sears American Dream Campaign - and by researching volunteer
opportunities through ABC's partnerships with the Points of Light Foundation, Volunteer.org, and
other agencies. In this effort to transform TV viewers into civically engaged citizens, ABC
encourages allegiance not to the State or the body politic, but to an ethical "community" filtered
through the Better Community Brand. In this sense, it constructs a template for citizenship that is not
unlike the participatory charities (such as Race for the Cure) analyzed by Samantha King. Drawing
from Rose, King's research shows that in "the contemporary organization of political responsibility,
subjects are addressed and understood as individuals who are responsible for themselves and others
in their `community."' This responsibility is not to be demonstrated by "the paying of taxes to support
social welfare programs, or by the expression of dissent and the making of political demands on
behalf of one's community, but through participation in practices of volunteerism and philanthropy."
Do-good reality television works in similar ways, by aligning TV viewers with an individualistic
ethic of compassion and the technical means through which it can be harnessed for the good of the
"community. "21
Volunteerism is promoted, not just as a personal and community responsibility but also as a venue for
middle-class consumer choice and lifestyle maximization. Tips on volunteering provided courtesy of
the Corporation for National and Community Service, a public-private agency devoted to "supporting
the American culture of citizenship, service and responsibility," situate the importance of finding the
"right" volunteer position as a choice that will lead not only to service but to self-fulfillment.
"Sometimes the hardest part of volunteering can be finding an opportunity that fits your personality,"
explains the site, which recommends customizing the experience to one's personal interests, beliefs,
and experiences so that it is "enjoyable and rewarding." Not only are volunteers elevated to a
position of civic power over the "needy" in their capacity to determine which causes are interesting
and worthwhile, they are also encouraged to see the practice of compassion as a variation of other
consumer-related activities. Unlike the restrictive guidance imposed on people who apply to appear
on Home Edition and the paternalistic requirement that the chosen families leave the renovations

entirely up to the experts, TV viewers are offered the "freedom" to tailor their own volunteer
experience from a list of possibilities, not unlike the shoppers who, with just one click, are invited to
customize the look of home-decor merchandise using the Sears Virtual Makeover Program. For TV
viewers who are not inclined to volunteer, compassionate consumption presents another sanctioned
(though less customizable) way to participate in the mobilization of private helping resources through
television. In the Katrina episodes, people moved by the human toll of the disaster were asked to
contribute money to Winds of Change, a fundraising drive organized through the integrated partnership
between Home Edition and Sears. And on the Better Community web site, they are asked to help by
purchasing Home Edition DVDs, with the promise that $1 per unit sold will be donated to charity.
The Proliferation of Charity TV
Home Edition's ratings success did not go by unnoticed by the television industry. In 2005, NBC
announced that it also was "granting wishes for deserving individuals" for a prime-time television
show entitled Three Wishes. Hosted by Christian recording artist Amy Grant, the program offers help
to individuals with a range of needs that are not limited to housing. Each week, the program travels to
a small or mid-sized town, typically in the Southern and Midwestern Bible Belts. A huge outdoor tent
bearing the corporate logo of Home Depot and other program sponsors is set up in the "town square"
(Home Depot was also a sponsor of the 2005 National Volunteer Conference in Washington).
Thousands of local people wait in line to enter the tent so they can plead their cases to the Three
Wishes casting agents in person. The viewer sees only a tightly compressed version of this fusion of
the updated breadline and the small-town faith revival. The implications of the mass rejections that
ultimately ensue are greatly minimized by a narrative focus on the three individuals who are helped
on each episode. In interweaving stories, Grant and her on-camera assistants work tirelessly on
behalf of these individuals to solve their immediate material problems and make their wishes come
true.
The criteria for determining who deserves help are not made explicit but, as with Home Edition,
some key themes are apparent. Beneficiaries of the interventions often have tragic circumstances that
are evoked to rank their needs above those of others who also spent hours in line hoping to appear on
the program. Seriously ill and disabled people (particularly children and teenagers) who need costly
medical treatments they cannot afford are often chosen, and here Three Wishes anticipated ABC's
Miracle Workers. By facilitating access to these services Three Wishes enacts a high-profile private
alternative to publicly funded health and insurance programs (such as Medicaid and medical
disability) that is limited in its capacity to help only a handful of the millions of Americans who
require some form of assistance with medical care. Unlike the familiar image of the impersonal,
slowmoving bureaucracy and surly personnel associated with state welfare programs, the Three
Wishes team provide swift, energetic, empathetic, and personalized attention to the people who
appear on the show. As TV "caseworkers" the hosts are able to focus entirely on coming up with
solutions to the special needs of individuals whose stories they have heard personally and who they
come to know intimately. However, the caseworkers have another crucial job besides attending to
needy subjects. Their role is also entrepreneurial in that they must personally mobilize and coordinate
the private resources required to make their wishes come true.

Illustration 1.3 Three Wishes host Amy Grant greets the residents of Brookings, South Dakota as they
wait in line to present their "cases." Only three will have their wishes granted by NBC (NBC
Universal TV for NBC, 2005)
Like Home Edition, Three Wishes classifies and rewards certain modes of conduct, including
personal responsibility and compassion for others. This code of ethics and conduct is differentiated
from the system of state-sanctioned rights and responsibilities emphasized during the welfare stage of
capitalism. As the Three Wishes casting call explains, "We are looking for emotional stories of
people in need. We want to help deserving people. People who always help others, but never think of
themselves." In the debut episode, a sick high-school teacher was characterized this way when the
program agreed to grant her request for a new football field. From her hospital bed, the teacher
explained that her students needed a place to play competitive football. The public school where she
worked did not have the resources to purchase new turf for the field; nor did the town where the high
school was located. Three Wishes did not dwell on the reasons for this funding shortage, but instead
asked a private manufacturer to donate the needed materials. The host handling the case flew across
the country to meet personally with the CEO of the company on camera. While the executive initially
stammered that he was "not in the business of philanthropy," he did agree to make the donation,
probably because television was involved. In this episode, Three Wishes demonstrated
"compassionate" capitalism as well as specific techniques of enlisting the corporate support of
nonprofit causes.
By granting the teacher's wish, Three Wishes demonstrated a private solution to a particular (and
seemingly isolated) local problem that is actually part of a larger pattern - inadequate and profoundly
unequal funding for public schools, particularly those located in low-income areas. Other episodes
also gloss over the shrinking public sector by granting individual wishes that compensate for
shortages of municipal and state resources. In one, Three Wishes secured private funding to build a
town library to fulfill the dream of a sick teenager who loved to read books. According to the

American Library Association, "America's libraries are now facing the deepest budget cuts in history.
Across the country libraries are reducing their hours, cutting staff or closing their doors - drastic
measures that were not taken even during the Great Depression." To overcome this problem, some
supporters of libraries have advocated the pursuit of "diversified" private resources to insulate the
public library system from a "dependency" on tax-based government funding. Although Three Wishes
did not reference this trend, it did enact the new method of library funding within the highly emotional
context of one girl's chronic health problems. In a similar vein, Three Wishes agreed to help a young
woman burdened with many thousands of dollars in student loan debt. Many recent college graduates
are in this situation because federal grant and tuition assistance programs created during the Great
Society era have been drastically downsized. Even low-interest student loans - which, unlike grants,
must be repaid when the student graduates - are becoming harder to obtain: This episode of Three
Wishes appeared around the time the House Education and the Workforce Committee approved $14.5
billion in cuts to spending on student loans - a move that critics said would cost the average student
borrower $5,800 more to attend college. It was in this broader but unstated context that Three Wishes
staff personally contacted Iowa Student Loan, the nonprofit lending institution to which the student
was indebted. According to a Des Moines newspaper, the president/CEO of Iowa Student Loan was
"happy to help" the Iowa State University graduate's wish come true, but he also emphasized that his
decision to waive her loans was an exception, not the rule. "Many young people begin their postcollege career already in debt," said the official, who placed responsibility for the situation squarely
on parents and the young and advised, "it's never too early to start financially planning for college.""
Three Wishes also demonstrates personal responsibility and self-enterprise in storylines that often
overlap with contemporary welfare reform discourse. The program has helped several low-income
single mothers with a wish to become better providers for their children by making it possible for
them to pursue higher education and/or start their own small businesses. The women who are helped
by NBC have, importantly, already "chosen" the path toward self-empowerment. The program is very
clear to differentiate them from an implied image of single mothers who "wait around for" or "depend
on" Welfare State entitlements. It is worth noting that when the public sector explicitly appears on
Three Wishes, it is shown to be a rigid bureaucracy that is more hindrance than help to those who
seek to empower themselves and their families. The program does call attention to elaborate systems
of rules and paternalistic forms of address found in public bureaucracies, but these are dismissed as
unavoidable annoyances rather than power dynamics worth addressing. In one episode, a boy wished
for a new pickup truck for his stepfather. According to the narrative, the boy was grateful to the man
for taking care of his family when his father died, and here the intervention overlapped with the
current promotion of marriage and stable two-parent families as a way to overcome the need for
welfare programs for low-income women and children. Upon discovering that the boy had not been
adopted by his stepfather owing to the maze of official paperwork involved, host Amy Grant used the
power of television to push the documents through a stalled bureaucratic process. After taking TV
cameras into the county courthouse, she eventually tracked down the appointed judge during his off
hours (he was at the airport, flying his personal plane) to obtain the necessary signature.
Three Wishes circulates discourses, or ways of thinking about welfare, the public sector, the family,
and corporate America. However, like other charity programs it goes beyond this discursive role to

also present applications, demonstrations, and techniques that are governmental in the sense of
shaping and guiding human behavior toward specific ends. The Three Wishes Dollars program is an
example of how charity TV incorporates behavioral action on the part of participants as well as
viewers. According to NBC publicity, this "conlniunity outreach" program (which doubles as
publicity for Three Wishes) works through the marriage of commerce and individual actions. The
network kickstarted the Three Wishes Dollars venture by traveling to 15 "markets" to grant a wish to
a local charity and "surprise shoppers and restaurant patrons by picking up the tab at select retailers,
including grocery stores and restaurants." NBC pays the retailers with $1 bills carrying Three Wishes
stickers, which "cashiers will then distribute to customers with their change." The corporate goal is to
"drive recipients" to the NBC/ Three Wishes web site by "encouraging consumers to use the marked
dollars to fulfill another person's wish to coincide with the show's theme." According to Barbara
Blangiardi, vice-president of marketing and special projects at NBC, "It's about touching people
individually and creating and weaving a magical web of support and community around these
individual wishes ... We thought this grassroots program that ... demonstrated and exemplified the
[purpose] of the show was the kind of thing we wanted to do." NBC also stated an intention to track
and publicize the ways in which consumers used their special Three Wishes dollars. In the trade
press, NBC executives predicted that the dollars would continue to generate good deeds. Summing up
how commerce and compassion intersect in the network's approach to community outreach,
Blangiardi explained: "We are using the stickered dollar bills so the currency will get into the
marketplace. And [we want to] encourage people to use that money to do something for someone else.
This is a unique execution for us. "23
Cable networks from Arts & Entertainment to MTV have also moved into charity TV programming,
recognizing that reality-based do-good ventures are not only good for the network's image but can
also be a successful venue for high ratings. As one A&E executive put it, "Television used to have a
public-service factor. Now the cable industry is finding a way to embrace those roots and offer
entertainment programming that might also do some good. That's the magic bullet if you can get both."
While the charity programs developed by cable tend to be aimed at specialized audiences and focus
on a single need, such MTV's car-makeover show Pimp My Ride, they incorporate many of the
conventions and techniques discussed so far. The A&E network, which is owned by the Disney
Corporation, has developed a broader approach with Random One, a grittier version of charity TV
that overlaps with the domestic/lifestyle intervention discussed in the next section. The official aim of
this program is to "breathe life" into the parable of the Good Samaritan by "scouting the streets of
America looking for people who need help solving everyday problems." According to the Random
One web site, the program also demonstrates the "power of grassroots philanthropy, defined as
people helping people one at a time." Toward that end, it advocates for "individuals who are ready to
better themselves," asking the question: "What can we do to help you help yourself?" Episodes have
helped homeless people find shelter and unemployed people find jobs, among other good deeds. Even
more than network charity programs, Random One emphasizes the need for personal responsibility. It
does not claim to make people's dreams come true, nor does it present television as a safety net. In
fact, it does not even accept applications, but instead selects people who need help on a "random"
basis. What the program claims to offer is a "nudge, helpful push in a life-changing direction," one
that will presumably fold into the larger society via the tips for making a difference, from donating

old clothes to the Salvation Army to "cleaning up a local park or playground," promoted on the
Random One web site. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, says A&E. The impetus to rise
above the needs of the post-welfare society is on the individual.
Charity TV is mainly a United States-based production (although some of the shows, including Home
Edition, do circulate internationally). This is undoubtedly related to both the economic dominance of
US culture and advertising industries and the minimized state of welfare in the United States
compared to other parts of the world. However, the format has begun to spread internationally,
particularly to locations that, for complex reasons, lack a state infrastructure for providing social
services. One example is Iraq, where Labor and Materials, a variation of Extreme Makeover: Home
Edition, debuted in 2004 to address the unmet needs of Iraqi families whose homes had been
destroyed during the ongoing US intervention. According to a description of the program, "In 15minute episodes, broken windows are made whole again. Blasted walls slowly rise again. Fancy
furniture and luxurious carpets appear without warning in the living rooms of poor families. Over six
weeks, houses blasted by U.S. bombs regenerate in a homeimprovement show for a war-torn country.
,24 Corporate sponsors do not figure in this example of public service; instead, each episode of
Labor and Materials encourages Iraqi TV viewers to donate the goods and services needed for future
interventions. What links the program to the US version of charity TV, and to the interventions we
will examine in the next chapter, is the enactment of private care through television as a foundation of
"good" government.

Chapter 2

TV Interventions:
Personal Responsibility and Techniques of
the Self
In fall 2005, television's Dr. Phil went on location to communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
In addition to encouraging volunteerism and raising relief funds through his nonprofit Dr. Phil
Foundation, the PhD-holding talk-show host visited makeshift shelters where he counseled victims
how to overcome anger and fear, and "rebuild their lives" in the aftermath of the worst natural
disaster in national memory. His gallant attempt to mobilize nongovernmental resources to deal with
the emergency is another example of TV's proactive role in the privatization of social services.
However, Dr. Phil's even more pressing concern with storm-related psychological issues and hurdles
moved beyond the handling of material needs to the management and care of the "self' as a way of
overcoming hardship. When Dr. Phil brought his bestselling brand of self-help to the Houston
Metrodome and invited displaced individuals who were "upset with FEMA" or had been "drinking
since the hurricane" to appear on his therapeutic TV program, he also brought the governing
capacities of another strand of reality TV - the life intervention - into focus.
Since its cultural explosion in the late 1990s, popular reality TV has presented an array of techniques
for diagnosing personal problems and transforming so-called needy and "at-risk" individuals into
successful managers of their lives and futures. "Life intervention" is the term we use to describe these
programs, which mobilize professional motivators and lifestyle experts, from financial advisors to
life coaches, to help people overcome hurdles in their personal, professional, and domestic lives. The
intervention can focus on transforming a person's entire relationship with her/himself, or it can
attempt to resolve specific problems related to raising children (Supernanny, Nanny 911, Brat Camp),
work (Starting Over), marriage and dating (Dr. Phil, Shalom for the Home, Judge Judy), household
management (Clean House, Mission: Organization), personal finances (Suze Orman), hygiene (How
Clean is Your House), health and fitness (The Biggest Loser, Honey We're Killing the Kids), or
addiction (Intervention). Makeover programs (The Swan, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Extreme
Makeover), which will be analyzed in the following chapter, can also work secondarily as life
interventions, in that they often provide some form of therapy, life coaching, or motivational guidance
to help people overcome their inner "problems" and link the desired "outcome" of physical
transformation to future personal and professional achievements.
Since the late 1990s, life interventions have become an expected staple of reality TV programming,
on major network as well as specialized cable channels. With their steady supply of therapeutic
experts and lifestyle managers, these programs have brought about what might be called the
neoliberalization of social work through reality TV, a phenomenon that is connected in complex, and
sometimes contradictory, ways to the political rationalities of welfare reform outlined in the previous
chapter. In the early twentieth century, social workers sought to disseminate the science of "right
living" to working-class and immigrant populations, believing that positive changes of habit and
conduct would improve the quality of life for these groups, and consequently stabilize society as a
whole.' Social workers (and before them, charity workers) were integral to the dispersion of liberal

strategies of governing through "freedom," in that they offered new forms of expertise that would
make it possible for people to regulate and manage their everyday lives without direct supervision or
coercion. Social workers cast their gaze on a wide range of "problems" related to health, sanitation,
nutrition, delinquency, child welfare, household management, recreation, and social and mental
hygiene. Eventually, many of their concerns and techniques for "watching over" needy and "at-risk"
populations were folded into public programs and services overseen by the expanding Welfare State.
Reality TV draws from social work's twin legacy as a professionalized helping intervention and as an
indirect and diffused mode of behavioral guidance and social control. However, reality TV also
reprivatizes social work by concep tualizing and conducting life interventions within the neoliberal
logic of self-entrepreneurialism and commerce. There is still an emphasis on instilling the right way
of doing things as a matter of an individual's "free choice," but the training involved is now more
explicitly tied to the governing authority of the market.
During the Progressive Era, social workers were part of a class of reformers who, in addition to
improving individuals, also fought to temper and regulate the power of industrial capitalism through
federal policy interventions, from child labor laws to food safety legislation. In the 1960s, social
work became a home for politically conscious professionals who sometimes aligned themselves with
movements for social change, including civil rights, economic justice, and feminism. The advocacy
potential of social work's turn was also illustrated by a crop of progressive dramas that appeared on
television during that period. As Mary Ann Watson and Aniko Bodroghkozy have shown, these
programs played out contradictions of liberal government through professionals who attempted to
insert themselves into struggles and policy debates over racial discrimination, abortion, and fair
housing, among other issues. One of the most provocative of these dramas, East Side/West Side,
featured a social worker who recognized the impact of structural inequalities on the "needy," and on
his own (mostly unsuccessful) efforts to intervene in their lives in meaningful ways. '
While dramas like CBS's East Side/West Side (1963) enacted the contradictions of radicalized social
work, today's reality TV focuses on instilling self-management techniques in individuals. TV's current
foray into social work combines the technical knowledge of lifestyle experts with entrepreneurial
discourses to provide detailed instructions for helping oneself overcome personal hardships and
difficulties. The programs hinge on a paradox, in that they often resort to authoritarian governing
techniques such as "home visits," hidden camera surveillance, pedantic lecturing, and close
supervisory relationships in an effort to produce self-sufficient citizens who are "free" because they
do not rely on the State or any other institution for discipline, care, or sustenance. The human subjects
addressed by the interventions are typically presented as less knowledgeable and less personally
motivated than the imagined TV audience, which makes it possible for the viewer to maintain some
distance from "at-risk" individuals who struggle (sometimes unsuccessfully) to overcome personal
hurdles by mastering the practical lessons on offer. However, the TV viewer is also invited, and even
expected, to be part of an empowering mission that spills beyond the TV program into interactive web
sites and tie-in merchandise, including books, DVDs, and workbook exercises. In this way, reality TV
draws from the disciplinary capacities of social work to diagnose and classify the needy as "other"
people who require (if only temporarily) harsh modes of supervision, and offers itself as a rather
more benign resource of self-care to the general population.

Empowering "Unruly" Individuals

Life interventions operate within the cultural economy of commercial television. Their governing
rationalities are realized within a market logic that values private ownership, profit accumulation,
and post- Fordist principles of flexibility and mass customization. Like charity TV, the format relies
on strategic "partners" (including corporate sponsors, advertisers, clinics, professional associations,
and nonprofit agencies) to enact its helping missions. TV as social service operates within networks
of support, offering serialized entertainment/ instruction tailored to lifestyle clusters (women, youth).
While television carries out its work independently of the State, the State plays an indirect role by
activating and mobilizing the spirit of public-private cooperation in which the life intervention has
thrived. It does the work that the State no longer has to do, through the rationalization of social
service as a network of government in which TV is integral. TV is not only part of a privatized
network of social service, it is also enterprise, and therefore life interventions fuse the aims of
cultural commerce (ratings, advertising, and product-placement revenue, licensing, and merchandising
tie-ins) with claims of public service. Within this framework, the programs deploy a continuum of
governing strategies, from detainment in a private facility to self-help strategies that liken running
one's life to managing a business. Their governing aims run the gamut from instilling good behavior in
children to improving one's health and longevity to avoiding toxic relationships to achieving selfesteem as a path to professional growth. What unites the TV programs that we are calling life
interventions is a concern with producing citizens who are not merely capable, but ultimately grateful
to learn how to govern themselves to their full capacities. No matter how strict and controlling some
of the techniques used can appear, the impetus is not really to display cruelty and punishment as a
means of deterring "misbehavior," as Michel Foucault hypothesized of the pre-modern spectacle of
torture in public. The rationality or point of the life intervention is to enact the idea that people who
are floundering must be taught (by any means possible) to maximize their capacities for normalcy,
happiness, material stability, and success.
As Wendy Brown points out, the capitalist state relies on a combination of overt and indirect
strategies to produce idealized citizens who are self-sufficient as well as self-governing.' Harsh penal
policies ("Three Strikes You're Out") and welfare-to-work schemes exemplify the former, whereas
the pedagogical aims of George Bush's "Compassion Agenda," which advocates such things as
character education in schools, and the circulation of information to ensure personally "responsible"
nutrition as a cure to national health crises, exemplify the latter. However, given that the long-standing
liberal ideal of "governing at a distance" has reached its zenith in a climate of privatization and
welfare reform, cultural technologies (including television) are arguably more important than official
government in the production of "good" (i.e., hard working, law-abiding, healthy-eating) citizens. As
Nikolas Rose explains, cultural technologies are integral to modern approaches to governing
precisely because they can translate the particular goals of rulers and authorities into diffuse
guidelines for living with no obvious connection to official government, formal laws or regulatory
procedures. This isn't a conspiratorial process, nor is it predictable or seamless.4 What Rose and
others call "governmentalities" come together from a nexus of sites including human and social
sciences, the corporate sector, culture industries, the public sector, and politics. Our goal here is to
show how these loosely aligned governing agendas are played out - and toward what ends - through

reality TV. Life interventions are an obvious place to begin this work, as their transformative aims
are so clearly stated most of the time.
The most authoritarian interventions focus on real people cast as incorrigible, self-destructive and/or
out-of-control. Here, television intervenes by dealing with so-called troubled populations who have
chosen to exist "outside" society's rules and norms. Due to an apparent inability to regulate
themselves through their freedom, these individuals must be controlled by altogether harsher means.
In 2005, ABC's Brat Camp, modeled after the BBC series of the same name, followed a cast of young
people who had been sent to an expensive private "boot camp" for disobedient teenagers. SageWalk,
a "therapeutic wilderness" school, bills itself as an "intense intervention program for troubled teens
between the ages of 13 and 17 who may be experiencing emotional, academic, and/or behavioral
problems." Overseen by a CEO, and staffed by professional therapists (many with social work
credentials), the school immerses teenage customers with "issues" ranging from ADHD to drugs,
promiscuity, and fighting in individual and group therapy, while also teaching them wilderness
survival skills intended to cultivate personal responsibility and a "better understanding" of behavioral
consequences and outcomes. According to news reports, ABC contacted psychologists, educational
consultants, and similar professionals to locate troubled teens for the series, which was sold to
SageWalk as a "documentary." The network picked up the bill for tuition (up to $425 per day) for the
right to record and broadcast what occurred at the "brat camp." Since the participants were minors,
their individual right to "choose" was trumped by those of their parents, who authorized the camp
visits as well as ABC's involvement in the program. While it is very unlikely that any of the teenagers
were literally forced to appear on the TV show (news reports suggest that many welcomed a chance
to "be on TV"), the idea of detainment was built into the governmental logic of Brat Camp through
editing, narration, and publicity, and in this way it became part of the prograin's "truth" about troubled
teenagers. The implied comparison of the "brat camp" to juvenile halls, boys' homes, detention
centers, and other places where young delinquents have been sequestered historically situated the
program within a history of dreaded confinement and punishment.
However, the "brat camp" was also situated as an efficient and empowering alternative to
bureaucratic disciplinary facilities. The point of voluntarily confining one's children to the pricey
wilderness "school" was not to drill obedience into them as a matter of force, but to teach them how
to manage and empower themselves through choice. While in the remote wilderness environment, the
teenagers are forced to endure physical "challenges" including long nature hikes with heavy
backpacks, surviving the elements on their own for days at a time, and camping in tents without
material comforts. The idea is that Mother Nature provides an ideal context for learning selfdiscipline, care of the self, and the need to accept personal "responsibility for actions and
consequences." The brutality of the outdoors is played up on the TV show, and so too is the severity
of the psychological retraining. Staff members are tough, authoritarian, and unrelenting, and the
cameras often "catch" the teens in escalating states of physical and emotional distress. However, the
spectacle of punishment (getting sent to the "brat camp") is tempered by the discourse of personal
empowerment. Not unlike welfare recipients who must be forced to work "for their own good," the
teens are immersed in a disciplinary regime so that they can learn to succeed in life. While this is
partly tied to the prevention of lawbreaking and other "dangerous" habits, it is also linked to

entrepreneurialism and what Rose calls "lifestyle maximization." Sounding as much like a Dale
Carnegie seminar as a delinquency center, SageWalk publicity describes a mission to "facilitate the
success and emotional growth of every student, while helping them to identify and reach their fullest
potential." Toward that end, the techniques and exercises are designed to instill "confidence, selfreliance, leadership, a strong work ethic, honesty, positive behavior, anger management and healthy
coping skills.'

Illustration 2. 1 TV interventions don't always deliver behavioral "outcomes," as ABC's Brat Cainp
acknowledged when a teenager was arrested for vandalism following his release from the program
(Shapiro/Grodner Productions, distributed by E4 to ABC, 2005)
The bold premise of Brat Camp - that "troubled" teens can be swiftly transformed into functioning
citizens through an intensive outdoors regime while TV cameras look on - sets up "outcomes"
expectations not unlike neoliberal reforms that hold welfare caseworkers accountable to the number
of employed individuals they produce. When news reports revealed that several "graduated" campers
had been arrested for crimes and misdemeanors, including spraying graffiti and driving a boat
recklessly, Brat Camp was blamed for failing to rehabilitate the young people as promised. The
"relapse" of unruliness on the part of the teens speaks to an important distinction between neoliberal
governing rationalities and the actual experience of complex, flesh-and-blood individuals. We can't
assume that programs such as this one are so powerful as to mold participants (or TV viewers) in
directions of their choosing. However, we do need to pay attention to the interventionist aims of Brat
Camp and similar ventures, for they play an important role in translating the preferences of
government "on high" into guidelines for succeeding in a "fend-for-yourself" post-welfare society that
in some ways is not so unlike the brutal wilderness camp. Finally, we need to call attention to the
broader rationalities that inform the programs, so as to shift the terms of their critique away from the
extent to which they are - or are not - "effective." Some professional therapists and social workers
were disappointed with the program, for example, because it obscured the "long-term follow-up care"

required to maximize the benefits of wilderness therapy and led viewers to a false impression that the
teens had been dramatically transformed "for good" in the space of a few weeks. We need to move
beyond this sort of functionalist analysis and its equivalent in cultural studies - the "resistive" viewer
- to unravel why life interventions have proliferated on TV, how they attempt to transform people, and
how these governmental agendas speak to broader social and political currents.
While Brat Camp intervenes in the lives of incorrigible minors who are committed to transformation
by their parents, some TV interventions sidestep the liberal ideal of "governing through freedom" for
the greater good of helping individuals who are "self-destructive" and unable to recognize their
handicap. Intervention, an Arts & Entertainment program, is built on the assumption that such
"addicts" are unable to behave rationally and therefore rely on friends and family to perform this role.
In each episode, A&E works with friends, family members, and professionals to facilitate an
"intervention" on behalf of two individuals who do not realize what is happening until the
"confrontation" occurs. The show is packaged and sold as reality entertainment, and its primary goal
is therefore to make money by selling advertising. However, it is also positioned as a public service,
albeit in an applied form. Television does not merely educate TV viewers about the "problem" of
addiction, as a traditional news report or documentary might do. Rather, it actively intervenes to
solve particular manifestations of the problem, which involves taking up duties normally carried out
by trained social work professionals. TV performs the business of social work by identifying
addiction as a problem, screening and evaluating cases, documenting their severity, interviewing
witnesses, consulting doctors and other professionals, coordinating a "confrontation" about the
problem and providing access to a residential treatment facility that it chooses and pays for. People
who are unable to self-regulate their consumption of drugs and alcohol are usually the focus, yet those
suffering from eating disorders, shopping compulsions, gambling habits and other addictive behaviors
are also the subjects of interventions.
Intenwention is very graphic in its portrayal of drug-induced compulsions and other "abnormal"
behaviors. In a particularly vivid episode, a bulimic woman demonstrated to the camera how she
vomited into disposable plastic bags in order to conceal her problem from loved ones (she was
apparently told she was participating in a documentary about eating disorders, not an intervention).
Without dismissing the concerns of people who participate in the programs, it is important to
recognize the extent to which "out-of-control" behaviors are documented in order to justify repressive
governing techniques that, even as they are carried out by individuals and the private sector rather
than state institutions, contradict the idea that we are all rational consumers/actors capable of looking
out for our own interests in a marketdriven society. Similarly, it is also worth noting the extent to
which "excessive" consumer behaviors and desires with many interpretations and social determinants
are construed as horrible individual tics that - if caught in time - can be brought under control by
professionals. The rhetoric of free "choice" in relation to the care of the self loons large as well, in
that while the addicts are nearly forced into treatment programs by those who "watch over" them
through everyday surveillance, the rationale is framed in terms of their future empowerment. Again,
the question to be answered is not whether TV can bring about behavioral modification, but how the
interventions work - in conjunction with other programs, discourses, and forms of media culture - as
technologies of citizenship that can translate particular governing aims into everyday terms with

practical applications.
Brat Camp and Intervention are exceptional in their use of bullying, cajoling, trickery, and force. Most
TV interventions unfold through a voluntary engagement with counselors, motivators, and life
coaches. Governing in the name of freedom, these ventures emphasize rules and regulations only as a
means of maximizing life, liberty, and happiness. However, even in the absence of force, life
interventions still seek to guide and shape human beings toward particular ends that uphold the goals
of the authorities, however beneficial or "freely chosen" they may be. Of all the popular reality
formats, they come closest to resolving the paradox of liberalism, defined by Rose as finding a
"means by which individuals may be made responsible through their individual choices for
themselves and those to whom they owe allegiance, through the shaping of a lifestyle according to
grammars of living that are widely disseminated, yet do not depend on political calculations and
strategies for their rationalities or for their techniques."' Escaping association with official
government of any kind, the "popular pedagogies" performed by reality TV seek to transform
individuals into empowered actors who can learn to overcome their problems with the nudging of
experts. While the proliferation of ever more specialized programs of self-help has surely contributed
to the increased "governmentalization" of everyday life, this doesn't require a centralized state or
even formal authorities to administer. On the dispersion and privatization of social work in the era of
the "actively responsible self," for example, Rose writes:
Social work, as a means of civilization under tutelage, gives way to the private counselor, the selfhelp manual and the telephone helpline, as practices whereby each individual binds themselves to
expert advice as a matter of their own freedom. The regulation of conduct becomes a matter of each
individual's desire to govern their own conduct freely in the service of the maximization of a version
of their happiness and fulfillment that they take to be their own, but such lifestyle maximization entails
a relation to authority in the very moment as it pronounces ' itself the outcome of free choice.
There is nothing new about popular media performing as everyday cultural technologies. Commercial
magazines have promoted health, wealth, nuclear families, and other agendas shared by rulers and
policymakers for many decades, and have circulated techniques of the self (including shopping) for
achieving these ideals. What is new, we contend, is the intensity with which popular reality TV has
taken up and regularized post-welfare grammars of choice, personal responsibility, and selfempowerment and applied them to a whole range of "problems" that encompass everything from
obesity to housecleaning to ineffective parenting. Because television is serialized and easily
accessible without much planning within the private space of the home, and because it has established
such a central place within the rhythms of everyday life, its capacity to govern informally is also
potentially greater than other media, including magazines and books, which require a different type of
engagement on the part of the individual who must seek them out on their own. Reality TV's
techniques for achieving "happiness and fulfillment" via the management and care of the self overlap
with the contemporary reasoning of welfare reform, not least because it is television's commercialism
- its allegiance and accountability to the "free" market - that authorizes its ability to intervene
socially. Despite funding cuts to virtually every need-based public welfare program, Congress voted
in 2005 to fund the pending transition to digital television to make sure that households without digital
sets, or who don't subscribe to digital cable or satellite "will be able to keep their television sets

working after broadcasters switch from analog to digital signals."' If reality TV is what currently
passes as social welfare, as we argued in the previous chapter, the State has staged its own
intervention to ensure that television (unlike the high-tech cultural products of the digital divide) will
continue to be available to one and all.
Self-Empowerment on Daytime TV
In recent years, life interventions have appeared on primetime television as part of the general
makeover/lifestyle trend in reality entertainment. On any given evening, TV viewers might encounter
nannies teaching parents how to manage unruly children, organizers teaching homeowners how to
empower themselves by decluttering, financial advisors teaching people how to get out of debt by
tackling their emotional problems, housecleaners teaching working mothers how to improve their
quality of life through sanitation, and nutritionists teaching families how to achieve good health by
exercising and eating better. TV viewers' interest in such topics may speak to a growing
preoccupation with middle-class "lifestyling" practices, as Charlotte Brundson argues. However, all
of these programming examples draw (however implicitly) from the governing legacy of social work
and tap into the discourse of privatization, personal responsibility, and selfempowerment that gave
shape to welfare reform. In that sense, they enact strategies of governing within specialized and often
problema- tized lifestyle domains. To understand how primetime's life interventions can work as
technologies of everyday government, it will be helpful to chart the transformation of daytime
television that predated them.
In the late 1990s, as national welfare reform policies were being discussed and implemented, realitybased self-help formats took over daytime television. One was the syndicated courtroom program,
which mushroomed after the success of judge Judy to become the fastest growing format on daytime
for several years. While not an intervention format per se, the courtroom program promoted a logic of
personal responsibility and self-help that anticipated many of the overtly interventionist reality
formats, and is therefore worth discussing in some detail. Since the life lessons offered by the
programs were explicitly aimed at lower-income women said to be the principal "at-risk" population
for welfare dependency, their alignment with changing strategies of governing was also particularly
clear. Ostensibly about resolving micro-disputes within the privatized space of the simulated smallclaims courtroom, the format quickly established itself as a resource for the government of the self.
Particularly in the hands of Judith Sheindlin, the bestselling self-help author and former New York
City judge who rules on Judge Judy, it became a pedagogical device for turning people caught in the
drama of everyday hardship into selfreliant and "empowered" citizens.
Sheindlin aims to cultivate self-empowerment and "rational" decision-making skills in her role as a
television mediator/motivator. She is not a therapist or social worker, but she often performs these
roles on her programs. In addition to probing the habits and conduct of the lower-income individuals
who mainly appear in her private courtroom, she lectures on the need to "take responsibility" for
one's actions to avoid "wasting the court's time" in the first place. Much of the guidance is aimed at
women, who are advised to avoid risky men, be "smart" about relationships, develop self-esteem,
earn their own living, understand the consequences of their actions, and quit depending on others -

including the State - for handouts. Judge Judy fuses postfeminist discourse to "techniques of the self,"
a term Foucault used to describe methods of working on and caring for the self as a matter of one's
obligation to the self. All "women have the power to make decisions, to call it as they see it, to take
no guff ,i10 she professes on the TV show and in her books - they just need to realize it. Conversely,
women who do not thrive and prosper create their own misfortunes by failing to "empower"
themselves: "'If you're a victim, it's your fault.' `Stop being a victim. Get a grip! You're the one who's
supposed to make a direction in your life.' All those messages I tried in Family Court to instill in
people - primarily women. [The TV show] sounded like something that would not only be fun, but
worthwhile as well."''
Judge Judy did not emerge in a vacuum: Feminist scholars have shown how the march toward welfare
reform has occurred in tandem with the acceleration of self-help programs aimed mainly at women.
From advice books on intimate relationships to self-esteem-building initiatives required of welfare
mothers, self-help regimens promise to "solve social problems from crime and poverty to gender
inequality by waging a social revolution, not against capitalism, racism and inequality, but against the
order of the self and the way we govern the self," argues Barbara Cruikshank.12 The solution to
women's problems is construed as having the right attitude, learning to make good decisions, and
taking responsibility for one's fate in the name of self- empowerment.13 In this sense, self-help is a
technology of citizenship that teaches women how to "evaluate and act" upon themselves so that the
social workers, medical establishment, and police "do not have to," says Cruikshank.l4 It works not
through force but through the promise of self-fulfillment and the circulation of practical techniques for
realizing these goals. Self-esteem is to be accomplished for the individual's own benefit, but also for
the benefit of a society that will no longer have to carry the "burden" of the needy citizen:
Personal fulfillment becomes a social obligation in the discourses of self-esteem, an innovation that
transforms the relationship of self-to-self into a relationship that is governable. Self-fulfillment is no
longer a personal or private goal. According to advocates, taking up the goal of self-esteem is
something we owe society, something that will defray the costs of social problems, something that
will create a "true" democracy. I5
Judge Judy uses the power of television to bring a self-help regimen to women who are living out
what feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser has called the "post-socialist" condition." It offers up
television as the most efficient way to resolve tensions steeped in the unacknowledged dynamics of
gender, class, and race, but it also classifies those who come to rely on television as needy
individuals who must learn to care for themselves and solve their own problems. In presenting
personal responsibility for the care of the self as an ethical duty, Judge Judy and other courtroom
programs exemplify Brown's argument that the "ideal" neoliberal citizen is an "entrepreneurial actor"
whose moral autonomy is measured by their capacity for "self-care - the ability to provide for their
own needs and service their own ambitions." As Brown argues, if the "rationally calculating
individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action no matter how severe the
constraints on this action, e.g. lack of skills, education and childcare in a period of high
unemployment and limited welfare benefits," the problem of the "mismanaged" life can become a way
of "depoliticizing social and economic powers.""

The courtroom format was also one of the first examples of popular reality TV to be institutionally
positioned as a form of "public service." The television industry was quick to insist that it "educates"
as well as entertains by acting as a "moral compass" for people seeking guidance and insight as well
as resolution, in the words of one TV station. However, "morality" was also being redefined by the
programs in relation to the neoliberal project of caring for the self in as efficient and strategic a way
possible. For example, many of the accompanying life lessons enacted on Judge Judy are aimed at
people who have foregone marriage and/or the nuclear family, with couples who choose to live
together "outside of wedlock" of particular concern. However, the issue isn't whether living together
is wrong, but that such arrangements are much too risky for the individuals involved. In this sense,
Judge Judy translates official governing strategies such as mandating marriage education and welfareto-work schemes as mechanisms for preventing women's dependency on the State, even as it operates
entirely independently of those policies. While Sheindlin does not present the failure to marry as a
moral problem in the same way that certain religious discourses might, she promotes marriage as a
"smart" behavior and specific techniques for navigating intimate relationships in the meantime,
including getting personal loans in writing, not "living together for more than one year without a
wedding band," and not "purchasing homes, cars, boats or animals with romantic partners outside of
wedlock."" Individuals are moreover told that they must learn to impose these "rules" upon
themselves, for their personal protection and because there is "no court of people living together. It's
up to you to be smart. Plan for the eventualities before you set up housekeeping."
If the citizen idealized by Judge Judy is self-esteemed and calculating, she is also self-sufficient. The
work ethic is the linchpin of Sheindlin's template for self-empowerment. Women who "depend" on
welfare benefits are very harshly cast as unmotivated and irresponsible rather than disadvantaged,
evoking Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon's observation that the stigmatizing discourse of
"dependency" that surrounds welfare presumes gender, class, and racial parity. Women (including
single mothers) are held personally accountable to a "white, middleclass male" work ethic, even as
they lack the material advantages and resources to perform as traditional breadwinners.19 While this
expectation marks a shift away from the patronizing assumption that all women are helpless and
therefore "naturally" dependent on men (or in their absence, the State), it offers no venue to
acknowledge or address social inequalities. On judge Judy, all women are fully capable of
supporting, caring for, and empowering themselves and their children provided they follow
Sheindlin's guidelines. They can be the mistresses of their own fate, if they choose to be.
Not long after judge Judy debuted, a motivational therapist named "Dr. Phil" became a semi-regular
feature on The Oprah Winfrey Show; in 2002, he began hosting his own self-help-oriented alternative
to the increasingly sensationalized and "unruly" talk shows that dominated daytime TV during the
1990s. Dr. Phillip McGraw, a PhD-holding psychologist, quickly established himself as a sterner,
more sober version of other ratings-chasing hosts by canning the spectacle, enforcing order, and using
television to deliver what he called empowering "life strategies." While other talk shows had
presented therapists and other experts who psychoanalyzed the ever more "outrageous" guests who
appeared, McGraw built his program around techniques for overcoming ordinary hurdles and
problems, and invited TV viewers at home to actively participate in this brand of self-empowerment
through an interactive web site and a growing empire of bestselling self-help books, workbooks,

DVDs, and other merchandise. One of McGraw's recurring life lessons across all of these venues is
"Take Care of Yourself" - not because there's no real alternative, but because "people who
consistently win are consciously committed to self-management. They are the most important resource
they have in achieving their goals. They actively manage their mental, physical, emotional and
spiritual health." And, all of McGraw's teachings offer "techniques of the self' as the means of
achieving this goal.
In his later work, Foucault traced an ethic he called the "care of the self' to ancient Greece, showing
how techniques of working on, taking care of, crafting, and testing the self that flourished during that
time formed the basis of a "government of the self."20 For Foucault, techniques of the self are the
practical "procedures, which no doubt exist in every civilization, suggested or prescribed to
individuals in order to determine their identity, maintain it, or transform it in terms of a certain
number of ends, through relations of self-mastery and selfknowledge." Foucault was not referring to
the "hidden meanings" and unconscious drives that concern psychoanalytic conceptions of the self. He
was interested in the practical application of knowledge to one's self, which led to questions such as
"What should one do with oneself? What work should be carried out on the self? How should one
`govern oneself by performing actions in which oneself is the objective of those actions, the domain in
which they are brought to bear, the instrument they employ, and the subject that acts?"21 Building on
Foucault's questions, Graham Burchell suggests that we conceptualize techniques of the self as being
made up of theoretically distinct but inseparable components: the "suggested" techniques that seek to
shape our actions, and the actual ways in which we work on ourselves. Because these components are
always in dialogue with each other, the "government of the self" involves a constant interplay of
power and agency that isn't predictable. Foucault agreed on this point, arguing that government is a
"contact point where technologies of domination of individuals over one another have recourse to
processes by which the individual acts upon himself and, conversely ... where techniques of the self
are integrated into the structures of coercion."22 For Foucault and Burchell alike, techniques of the
self must always be contextualized, for they are not "essential" qualities of human nature but rather
specific knowledges and self-shaping practices that can and do change historically. At the present
juncture, the techniques of the self circulating on and through popular reality TV often have something
to do with the cultivation of self-empowerment through personal responsibility and choice.
To analyze reality TV's relationship to the interplay that Burchell describes, we would need to
consider more closely the ways in which actual people incorporate Dr. Phil's techniques into their
self-shaping strategies and practices. Such research is beyond the scope of this book, which focuses
on charting a changing rationality of liberal governing as well as television's role in demonstrating
and enacting it. Our task is to trace the techniques of the self that have proliferated in relation to the
reality TV boom, while always keeping in mind the complexity of their application. Dr. Phil is
important because he was one of the first TV motivators to apply a neoliberal reasoning of governing
to a wide range of everyday and altogether ordinary "problems," from marital difficulties to weight
issues. And, although the doctor's educational credentials and past experience as a professional
therapist lend a stamp of authority to his helping strategies, it was his ability to fuse techniques of the
self to practices of "personal accountability" that made him such a powerful translator of neoliberal
currents. One of McGraw's principal techniques for self-empowerment is to "acknowledge and accept

accountability for your life" and "understand your role in creating results." As in welfare reform
discourse, the individual is responsible for managing her own fate through acts of choice:
You cannot dodge responsibility for how and why your life is the way it is. If you don't like your job,
you are accountable. If you are overweight, you are accountable. If you are not happy, you are
accountable. You are creating the situations you are in and the emotions that flow from those
situations ... Every choice you make - including the thoughts you think - has consequences. When you
choose the behavior or thought, you choose the consequences ... When you start choosing the right
behavior and thoughts - which will take a lot of discipline - you'll get the right consequences.23
Dr. Phil promises to empower people in need by showing them how to empower themselves. The
paradox is that in order to achieve empowerment, the individual must perpetually follow a system of
"Life Laws" established by Dr. Phil. These laws underscore the self-work that is performed on the
TV program and are offered to TV viewers in a more elaborate form via McGraw's self-help books,
workbooks, and web site (which features links to lessons, quizzes, and "self-tests," and interactive
self-shaping activities such as keeping an online journal). This system of self-regulation draws
entrepreneurial techniques as well as authority from the business sector. As suggested by Life Law
#7, "Life is Managed, Not Cured," the individual is to become an effective (and perpetual) manager
of her/himself. This involves identifying strengths and weaknesses, learning techniques of selfdiscipline and self-motivation, and adapting the "rules" to each new thought, situation, or challenge
that occurs across the various facets of everyday life. The move from "passive and dependent" to
"active and empowered" hinges not only on perpetual work on the self, but turning the self into a
commodity or managerial "resource" for securing "payoffs" such as satisfaction and success. The
philosophy of working on the self, for the self, is stated on the Dr. Phil web site:
You are a life manager, and your objective is to actively manage your life in a way that generates
high-quality results. You are your own most important resource for making your life work. Success is
a moving target that must be tracked and continually pursued. Effective life management means you
need to require more of yourself in your grooming, self-control, emotional management, interaction
with others, work performance, dealing with fear, and in every other category you can think of You
must approach this task with the most intense commitment, direction and urgency you can muster. The
key to managing your life is to have a strategy. If you have a clear-cut plan, and the courage,
commitment and energy to execute that strategy, you can flourish."
Dr. Phil conveys the idea that it us up to the individual to empower her/himself in episodes with
names like "Self Matters," "How to Make Millions," and "Creating Happiness." However, the TV
program does not completely trust people's capacity to accomplish this on their own and therefore
offers step-by-step "Formulas for Success" to guide and assist them. The extent to which freedom and
agency are to remain perpetually contingent on generic templates for maximizing one's current and
future success speaks to the contradictions of neoliberalism's presentation of self-sufficiency as an
essential freedom. One way this contradiction is managed by Dr. Phil is through techniques of
"personal accountability," an aspect of managing the self that is to be called upon at junctures when
things are not going well. The principal technique for measuring personal accountability is the
"lifestyle audit." As this business term would suggest, the lifestyle audit is a practical strategy for

determining the individual's contribution to failed goals and undesired life "outcomes." Auditing has
gained currency in the downsized public sector as a way of keeping government accountable to the
rationalities of the marketplace. Dr. Phil applies the technique to everyday life with exercises that
include writing down everything that "you are doing" to contribute to personal failures.
The "sample audit" provided on the Dr. Phil web site leads the individual into a detailed assessment
of the technical minutiae of her personal behavior and conduct. In the theoretical situation, a woman is
unhappy in her marriage. Since heterosexual marriage is an unquestioned ideal on Dr. Phil, the audit
focuses on what the woman has done (or is doing) to bring about her misery. Leaving is not an option,
for a "bad marriage doesn't exist without a lifestyle to support it." The wife's specific problem - she
doesn't like being left at home while her husband goes out to socialize - is to be traced to the
"elements in her lifestyle" that support his undesirable behavior, which in the sample audit include
gaining too much weight, neglecting her appearance, not having appropriate clothing to wear on social
occasions, and developing health problems that make her "too tired" to socialize. The idea is that the
individual can change an undesired life "outcome" by delving into the details of the situation and
honing in on the undesired "results" of their own behaviors and actions. By writing down, reflecting
on, and working to change her lifestyle habits, the woman in the sample audit can eventually achieve
personal happiness within her existing marriage.
In 2004, another life-intervention format appeared on daytime TV, claiming to help women "reinvent"
themselves with the help of life coaches, psychologists, corporate sponsors (called "partners"), and
nonprofit agencies. Starting Over fuses the popular conventions of the reality-based soap opera
("docu-soap") with a total immersion in the sort of self-empowerment training offered by judge Judy
and Dr. Phil. Created by Bunim-Murray Productions, the production company responsible for MTV's
The Real World, it sequesters six women in a private-group home facility, where they work with
professionals and each other to achieve particular life goals while cameras document the process.
When the women have learned sufficient techniques for pursuing their goals independently, they
formally "graduate" from the Starting Over house, and another individual who requires help moves in.
Women come to the program with a range of specifically designated "problems," including addiction,
weight issues, dating difficulties, unwed pregnancy, and unemployment. To overcome them, the
women participate in group therapy as well as results-oriented coaching sessions, customized selftests, and professional workshops, while the cameras observe and record. There is also some
unstructured interaction among the women caught on tape, in which problems and goals are further
discussed, friendships are formed, and interpersonal tensions emerge.
Starting Over teaches many of the "techniques of the self' discussed so far, including calculated
decision-making, personal accountability, and self-esteem. While these strategies for working on and
governing the self are informed to various degrees by the governing rationalities of welfare reform,
they are expressed as the hopes and desires of the women themselves. During the first season, the
Starting Over program intersected with the aims of welfare reform as codified by the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 by casting a young single mother
who was African-American with a goal of breaking the "cycle of welfare dependency." The
biography created for Rain exemplifies what Rose calls the governmental impetus to reconstruct the
"will" of welfare subjects through a "model of enterprise, self-esteem, and self-actualization .2'

According to the Starting Over web site, Rain's "dependency" can be overcome by her strong "will"
to change herself - a will that the TV program's life management professionals can develop and
shape:
Rain has been scraping by on government assistance, but she wants to be more than just another
statistic on the welfare. She began a lucrative career in long-haul trucking, to help improve her
situation, but it didn't last long due to sexual harassment and separation from her children. Rain has a
willingness to achieve and just needs some help breaking free from the system, so she can begin to
build a new life for herself and her daughters.26
Entrepreneurialism is both a resource and a technique of self-help on Starting Over. Corporate
"partners" provide some material assistance to the women, including graduation gifts and modest
"startup" funds to obtain apartments, start small businesses, and pursue other life goals. The program's
therapeutic approach is also drawn from enterprise. The resident counselors are called "life
coaches," a term that originated in the corporate sector and has now made its way into the helping
professions, where it refers to personal motivators who are less concerned with the so-called "talking
cure" than with helping customers achieve specific goals and outcomes. The governing authority of
the life coaches stems not only from their ability to "get results" with self-help strategies but from the
market, where they are said to be very much in demand, as evidenced by their Starting Over
biographies, which call attention to their speaking gigs, self-help books, DVDs, and other products,
including personalized online guidance. The main coach on Starting Over is Rhonda Britten, a "life
strategist" who also appears as the "Life Doctor" on the BBC's Help Me Rhonda, a reality-based TV
show that "transforms people's lives" and has been featured in seminars on US public television.
Drawing from the discourse of self-help, she explains her approach as guiding "the women of Starting
Over back to their personal power" and giving them "the skills and confidence to fulfill their personal
vision." Britten is joined by Iyanla Vanzant, a "spiritual" counselor who, in addition to appearing on
Starting Over, operates a prison ministry and is CEO of her company, Inner Visions Worldwide, Inc.,
which operates a "Spiritual Life Maintenance Center" and a certification program in Spiritual
Counseling and Life Coaching. Bringing faith into the neoliberalization of social work more directly
than other daytime programs, she takes a "spiritual" approach to selfhelp that "teaches people how to
move beyond whatever has happened in their lives in order to do and be what we came to life to do
and be." On the Starting Over web site, the life coaches market themselves, their products, and their
services to TV viewers who are always constituted as potential customers. The commodity they are
selling is self-esteem, or at least the ability to develop self-esteem swiftly, for a price, through
proprietary, results-oriented techniques only they can provide.
This "can-do" entrepreneurial ethos informs the helping strategies practiced on Startinc Over, as well
as their value to client-custonlers. One of the program's star pupils, a woman named Andy,
established a helping enterprise of her own after graduating from the Startinc Over house. Her
business, Dollars and Cents, claims to empower women by teaching them how to dress for success on
a budget. She now has her own web site, where she promotes her makeover services, and she also
appears on Starting Over as a lifestyle expert. The enormous value placed on self-entrepreneurialism,
coupled with the program's focus on specific (and therefore measurable) outcomes, creates a context
in which "failure" is highly visible as well. For example, the Starting Over web site also features a

link to Rain's personal web page, where she candidly describes a hard spell after graduation and
several unsuccessful entrepreneurial ventures (including a stint selling Mary Kay cosmetics). Rain is
able to use her entrepreneurial skills as what Foucault called a counter-strategy, in order to publicize
her difficult experience after leaving the Starting Over house and to document her inability to achieve
an outcome of financial self-sufficiency. However, the logic of self-help offers Rain no way to
explain her situation, other than to express disappointment in herself and resolve to try harder.
Startit,Q Over presents a glimpse - however mediated by television through technologies of casting,
direction, camera, and editing - into the complex interplay between "suggested" techniques of the self,
and work that people do on themselves. We witness the women's sometimes ambivalent and resentful
response to the life coaching they receive, as well as their attempt to process and apply the lessons
they have learned to their past experience and future conduct. However, this interplay occurs within
the self-empowering agenda of the program, which mandates the women to cooperate with the
professionals to their full capacities or else to accept personal responsibility for "failures," such as
not "graduating" from the house as scheduled or being asked to leave the facilities altogether. A
similar constraint is at work in the support system the women develop among themselves. The
residents of the house often form intensely supportive relationships, acting as empathetic listeners,
constant encouragers, sounding boards, and surrogate coaches. In these relationships, "techniques of
the self" that are not bound to the professional regimens can and do emerge, to the extent that the
women share their personal experiences, insights, strategies, and suggestions with each other
informally. In some ways, this supportive female bonding simulates the feminist consciousnessraising group with an important difference: there is no impetus within the "can-do" political
rationality of the Starting Over program to move beyond individualized work on the self to strategize
about structural and institutionalized experiences of sexism, racism, and economic exploitation.
The interplay between Starting Over and TV viewers occurs within similar types of constraints. Like
Dr. Phil, Starting Over is a regularized form of self-help that enters the home as serialized
entertainment. The TV viewer is not required to seek out a self-help regimen to informally engage
with these programs, which is what distinguishes reality TV from other cultural technologies,
including self-help books. However, both programs also enlist old and new media technologies to
create a multilayered viewing experience that extends well beyond the television "text," and that
enables the TV viewer to engage more directly with the techniques of the self that are demonstrated
on camera. The Starting Over viewer is invited to actively participate in the selfempowerment ethos
of the program by discussing episodes in online chat rooms; subscribing to the Starting Over
newsletter; making use of "Life Resources" and "Life Coaching Tips" featured on the web site;
reading the biographies, diaries, and updates of cast members; and possibly purchasing merchandise
peddled by the program's branded experts for their own projects of reinvention. "Interactivity" is not
limited to a richer engagement with practices of meaning-making as theorized by scholars of
television fandom, nor is it purely a marketing scheme that exploits participation for commercial
purposes. Like other reality-TV life interventions, Starting Over encourages a form of "interactivity"
that is about the practice of self-shaping, and in this sense it has much in common with women's
magazines, which have long engaged female readers in techniques of self-improvement. The program
televises "real" women who are deeply immersed in a professional regimen of self-help, but it also

mobilizes the TV viewer to work on herself using the resources it provides. This dynamic process of
self-work can never be fully directed by Starting Over or any cultural technology, but it is steered
toward the entrepreneurial governing logic of goals and outcomes. For example, Starting Over offers
a "support system" for TV viewers who wish to "start over" in their own lives. The woman defines a
specific ("keep it simple") goal, and the program sends an entail announcement to a list of family and
friends. The Starting Over staff promises to help her stay "motivated as you make progress towards
your goal" through a "series of regular entail check-ins and updates." The circle of friends is invited
to become a "personal support system - almost like your Starting Over housemates. They'll send you
an encouraging email and help you stay committed to your goal. Who knows, they might even set a
Starting Over goal of their own." If the woman accomplishes her designated goal, Starting Over sends
a celebratory announcement to the email circle. The woman also qualifies for the chance to be
featured in the "Tell Your Friends You're Starting Over" section of the Starting Over web site or on a
special TV broadcast. Similar to women who appear on the TV program, she is rewarded for
working on herself for herself, within a governing rationality that offers self-empowerment as the only
solution to women's problems.
Primetime Interventions: Governing through Lifestyle
While daytime TV enlists the female viewer in entrepreneurial forms of social work on the self,
primetime interventions often focus on problems that materialize in the realm of family and lifestyle.
Since the late 1990s, a cadre of reality programs have emerged to teach individuals and families how
to diagnose problems of everyday life so as to better manage their children, households, health, and
leisure time. While this programming is not as obviously synchronous with welfarereform policies as
are ventures like Starting Over, it does circulate techniques for a "government of the self' that
complement the current political value placed on individual choice, personal accountability, and selfempowerment. In an era when the State has given the job of looking after the welfare of citizens to
individuals and the private sector, reality TV's efforts to help real people improve their "quality of
life" plays another governing role as well. As Brown points out, the "withdrawal of the state from
certain domains, and privatization of certain state functions does not amount to a dismantling of
government, but is a technique of governing - rational economic action suffused throughout society
replaces express state rule or provision. "'' What happens is that neoliberal regimes shift the
"regulatory competence of the state onto responsible, rational individuals," with the aim of
encouraging then to "give their lives a specific entrepreneurial form." As "lifestyle" becomes one of
the principal domains through which citizens are expected to look after themselves in the name of
their own interests, their capacity to make "rational" choices in matters of health, consumption,
family, and household takes on more urgency. Entrepreneurialized guidance in "lifestyle
maximization" and the care of the self replaces the watch of the State as the mechanisms through
which "free" individuals are governed across daily life, and through which they come to govern
themselves in the name of self-fulfillment and improved quality of living.
The explosion of reality-based health- and nutrition-related programming is one example of TV's
enlistment to resolve the dilemma of citizens who do not make the "right" choices when assigned the
rational responsibility of their own governance and self-care. Such fare abounds on the Discovery

Channel, The Learning Channel, and other cable venues, including Fit TV, a network entirely devoted
to teaching consumers how to develop a lifestyle based on home exercise, rational grocery shopping,
and healthy eating. Network television has also taken up these concerns: In 2005, ABC debuted The
Biggest Loser, a primetime weight-loss program with a focus on the health benefits of keeping trim.
The network provides the services of nutritionists and personal trainers to people who agree to slim
down on television, and offers a cash prize to the person who sheds the most body fat. The program's
rationale isn't tied exclusively to appearance. The benefits of achieving a healthy lifestyle, including
longevity, being accountable to one's children, and improving one's job performance, are emphasized
as the truly important reasons for losing weight. The team of professionals advises and motivates the
contestants as they carry out intense physical exercise regimes, learn about nutrition, and develop
balanced and "disciplined" eating habits. Evoking Foucault's discussion of the care of the self in
ancient Greece, where the feast was one of many rituals for testing one's capacity for selfcontrol, the
cast was regularly tempted with vast displays of decadent foods to test their determination and
willpower.28 At the end of each episode, the "outcome" of these physical and mental activities is
measured live on television in a dramatic weighing ceremony.
TV viewers are invited to stage their own life intervention by slimming down and "getting healthy,"
using the resources provided by the program and its multimedia components. The "text," in the old
sense of broadcast media, is only one element in a network of cultural technologies that coalesced
around the Biggest Loser concept. Viewers are invited to take part in its interventionist ethos by
applying an array of technical suggestions and motivational strategies to their own weightloss
regimes. ABC has constructed an interactive web site complete with nutritional guides, dieting tips,
sample recipes and menus, customizable exercise regimes, and weight-loss tools, including a body
mass index calculator. Tie-in merchandise - including workbooks and the Biggest Loser exercise
DVD - is available for purchase, and participants are also urged to join the Biggest Loser email club
and sign up for informative podcasts. Finally, for people on the go there is also the much-promoted
Biggest Loser wireless service. For only $2.99 per month, anyone with a cell phone can sign up to
receive a daily health tip, an exercise pointer, or inspirational message. In extending these body- and
health-management resources and techniques to individuals, ABC fuses popular entertainment (weight
loss as a competitive game) and self-shaping activities with current requirements of governing,
including the need for citizens to accept personal accountability for the consequences of their lifestyle
choices. And in this sense, The Biggest Loser intervenes in the "micro-moral domains" of everyday
life in ways that are quite similar to the self-help programs found on daytime television.
The logic of personal accountability is rendered even more explicit on Honey We're Killing the Kids,
a series that originated on the BBC and now appears in the United States on The Learning Channel.
Each week, a stern nutritionist named Dr. Lisa Hark sets out to demonstrate how "everyday choices
can have long-term impacts on children, and offers both the motivation and the know-how to help turn
families' lives around." The program intersects with the "reinvention of government" in its emphasis
on outcomes: Armed with the latest scientific research and a team of advisors from Harvard and
Johns Hopkins universities, Hark aims to change the "bad habits" of an actual family in a period of
just three weeks. However, as the urgency of this timecompressed mission cannot be fully contained
by rational discourse, the episodes lean toward the hyperbolic. The parents, who are openly chastised

for smoking and overeating, are shocked into a householdregime change by Hark's bold accusation
they're "killing their kids" by letting them eat too much junk food and play video games and watch
television instead of exercising. Digitally-aged images of the children at age 40 created with "stateof-the-art" technology and "certified assessments based on measurements and statistics" are
profoundly exaggerated. As if the sallow skin, stained teeth, heavy jowls, stringy hair, and dour facial
expressions weren't enough, Dr. Hark tells the parents their children are "at risk" for developing
obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and other life-shortening diseases. In teaching care of the
self, the program literally objectifies the child-subject, turning him/her into an undesirable stranger.
Not surprisingly, the parents generally gasp out loud, and swiftly agree to cooperate with the doctor's
"rules, guidelines and techniques" for transforming the children's health and lifestyle.

Illustration 2.2 Honey We're Killing the Kids uses computer imaging and scare tactics to encourage
proper nutrition and family exercise regimens (Entrant Co.: BBC, UK for The Learning Channel,
2006)
The televised crash course that ensues follows the template of many primetime lifestyle interventions.
The doctor arrives at the home, observes the family in their natural habitat, diagnoses their problems,
locks up all the junk food, introduces a set of rules, and sums up their new and improved lifestyle
with a list of easy-to-memorize slogans (e.g., "Sack the Sugar," "Exercise Together"). Cameras
capture initial resentments, mid-episode slip-ups and the eventual mastering of the "healthy" lifestyle
they have come to desire as their own. At the end of each episode, the "outcome" of the regimen is
demonstrated by new digitally-aged photographs that show the children looking youthful and healthy.
The parents are greatly relieved and dutifully promise to enforce the new diet and exercise regimen
once the doctor has moved on to assist other needy families.
While the episodes are redundant, this doesn't diminish the importance of Honey We're Killing the
Kids as an example of the neoliberalization of social work through television. This program teaches

personal responsibility for the care of the self by diagnosing and rehabilitating cases of "ignorance"
and self-neglect, and allowing the TV viewer at home to identify as normal in comparison to these
extreme cases. However, this doesn't prevent the program from acting as a resource to the healthconscious: TV viewers are invited to seek out and master the skills required to create a healthy
lifestyle on the program's web site, which includes interactive resources, games, and merchandising
tie-ins. And, while there's no direct link between the diffuse aims of reality TV and the policies of
official rulers and politicians, there are some similarities of reasoning that are worth considering.
Honey We're Killing the Kids has appeared at a juncture when the State is concerned about health and
fitness but unwilling to do anything about it that would compromise the "hands-off' approach to
government regulation favored by neoliberal regimes. Unlike the Progressive Era, when social
workers of all kinds promoted national reforms as well as individual compliance, today's helping
culture is mainly focused on the self. When public-interest organizations do push for policy action,
they are cast as controlling and paternalistic institutions who wish to regulate freedom of choice.
During the 2004 House Government Reform Committee's hearings on "The Supersizing of America,"
Marshall Manson of the rightwing Center for Individual Freedom criticized the Center for Science in
the Public Interest for pushing "extreme" measures such as regulating the food sold in schools and
"mandated labeling of restaurants with detailed nutrition information." Linking the regulation of
culinary commerce to the erosion of free choice, Manson told the committee:
Our democracy is founded on the idea that individuals have basic freedoms. Among these, certainly,
is the right to choose what we put on our plates and in our goblets ... anti-food extremists like CSPI
would gladly take away that freedom and mandate our diet in order to save us from ourselves. It is
time for these zealous advocates to understand that it is not the federal government's job to save us
from ourselves by making our choices for us.29
As Manson stated, the only legitimate option for the State within this reasoning is to encourage
"responsible decision-making" in consumers who are not only "free" to manage their own health but
are expected to do so. Toward this end, George W. Bush launched a program called Steps to a
Healthier US to encourage "simple improvements in physical activity, diet and behavior" as a means
to controlling chronic disease. The program is sponsored by the Presidential Program on Physical
Fitness and Sport (www. Fitness.gov), a State program that dates back to the Kennedy administration
and is now administered through more than 600 "partnerships" with corporations, nonprofit agencies,
and local governments. This is in turn linked to the President's Challenge, a privately-based network
of corporate, nonprofit, and regional/municipal partners, including major sports and athletic
businesses, food companies (Burger King, Coca-Cola, General Mills), and a number of television
networks (including ESPN and the Cartoon Network). These networks of partnerships between
government, corporations, and non-profit agencies speak to the State's role in facilitating the
privatization of welfare through public-private educational initiatives and the relegation of care to the
corporate sector.
This approach to welfare relies on cultural technologies to govern at a distance by shaping and
guiding behavior toward "rational" choices and outcomes. Honey We're Killing the Kids works as
such a technology, and within these networks of support it attempts to help solve the "crisis" of
obesity by locating its causes in bad habits and issuing a "critical wake-up call for parents."

Promoting personal accountability through rational shopping and eating, it presents resources for
choosing a healthy lifestyle as a matter of one's freedom and empowerment. Reformers like Manson
have no problem with commercial TV shows taking up this persuasive role, because their authority to
govern is sanctioned not by the State, but by the commercial logic of "supply and demand." Honey
We're Killing the Kids exemplifies television's role in the entrepreneurialization of social work, in
that the market - not the State - is responsible for ensuring the health outcomes of the population. It
illustrates Rose's argument that while healthy bodies are still a "public value and political objective,"
we no longer need state bureaucracies to "enjoin healthy habits of eating ... with compulsory
inspection, subsidized incentives to eat or drink correctly and so forth." In the new domain of
consumption, "individuals will want to be healthy, experts will instruct them on how to be so, and
entrepreneurs will exploit and enhance this market for health. Health will be ensured through a
combination of the market, expertise, and a regulated autonomy."""
Like other TV life interventions, Honey We're Killing the Kids puts the impetus to succeed in health
and in life on self-governing individuals. It brings a lucrative new version of social work into the
home via reality entertainment, and ignores big-picture issues such as the high cost of organic food,
substandard health care for low-income populations, reduced funding for food stamps and other
welfare prograins, and a class system that makes fast food a more viable lifestyle option than the lean
protein, vegetables, and wholegrains promoted by nutritional experts. The irony of commercial
television preaching nutritional fitness as an individual solution to national health problems is not lost
on those of us who remember Ronald Reagan insisting (in the midst of debates over funding cuts to
school lunch programs) that "ketchup is a vegetable." What Honey We're Killing the Kids is also
telling the masses signified by excess flesh, cigarette habits, and addiction to television is that their
pleasures in food are irrational and must be rehabilitated by experts. Hidden camera footage of
resentful children (and sometimes their parents as well) breaking into the forbidden junk food stashes
is replayed to condemn those who are unable to self-police their forbidden cravings (though the
break-ins can also be interpreted as resistance to this power play). Honey We're Killing the Kids
blames the health crisis on people's uninformed habits and ungoverned desires, and promotes the idea
that our social, economic, and physical fate in life is determined only by the little choices we make,
not the social structures we inhabit.
Primetime TV interventions focus on diagnosing and solving lifestyle problems within the family and
the domestic sphere. This concern emerged in tandem with official government's promotion of the
twoparent heterosexual family as a strategy for empowering low-income populations, particularly
mothers and children. According to George W. Bush, "Stable families should be the central goal of
American welfare policy." Reality TV promotes stable, functioning families by circulating regimens,
skills, and rules related to household organization, cleanliness, time management, and parenting. A
cadre of instructionalentertainment programs from Wife Swap (ABC) to Decorating on a Dune (Home
and Garden Network) cater to women's presumed role in carrying out strategies of government within
the domestic economy of the home. Hou, Clean is Your House (Lifetime), which originated on the
BBC before arriving in the United States, exemplifies how television helps women who are now
expected to be self-sufficient workers as well as homemakers by teaching then the "forgotten" skills
of domestic management, in this case sweeping, dusting, scrubbing, and scouring. The program draws

from, but also entrepreneurializes and tempers, through humor, a long history of experts (charity
workers, social workers, domestic scientists) seeking to instill habits of cleanliness in the masses. In
each episode, experts in hygiene and sanitation arrive at an untidy home, conduct a thorough
inspection, diagnose sanitation problems, and demonstrate proper housekeeping techniques using
brand-name products (the product placements are also pitched on the Hou, Clean is Your House web
site, where TV viewers can discuss housecleaning tips and play interactive cleaning games like
Wipedown). Extending the concept to problems of personal hygiene, the BBC has developed a spinoff of How Clean is Your House called Too Posh to Wash. Other programs bring lifestyle experts
into the home to deal with the problem of clutter, on the grounds that decluttering the home can
facilitate personal empowerment as well as better functioning families. "Think of it as "residential
rehab, an interior intervention," says Clean House; "Organization is hard work, but in the end you will
feel as if a huge burden has been lifted off your shoulders," claims Mission: Organization (Home and
Garden Network).
While the focus is on empowering individuals (mainly women) to achieve domestic proficiency, the
shows also intervene in social and psychological hurdles, from poor self-esteem to "compulsive
shopping," a recurring diagnosis across the intervention format that exists in perpetual tension with
reality TV's commercialism. For example, on an episode of Cleau House, a single mother who turned
to shopping to "fill a void in her life" was encouraged to recognize her "problem" and learn a rational
and controlled approach to consumption at the same time she was acquiring new products to
transform her overcrowded and chaotic home into a functioning environment for herself and her child.
Reality TV's high-profile nanny programs bring together many of the techniques of the self we have
discussed so far. Superuauuy (ABC) was also spun off from a series of the same name on the BBC;
Fox developed a virtual clone called Nanny 911. Both programs enlist very stern but compassionate
British nannies to teach parenting skills and overall household management to frazzled parents,
particularly mothers. The programs are positioned as resources for "saving" the modern family, and in
this way are tied to the Bush administration's moralization of governing through the promotion of
traditional family values and faith-based social authorities. The emergence of the nanny as a figure for
mobilizing "real-life" behavioral change in the home has occurred alongside criticism of the "nanny
state," especially in the United Kingdom. While the term "nanny state" implies that official
government intervention in social life is paternalistic and therefore wrong, the TV nanny governs
within the private context of commercial television, which makes her interventionist approach to
reforming family life not only tolerable, but in sync with rationalities of welfare privatization and
personal responsibility. ABC has situated Supenranny within its Build a Better Community outreach
project which, as we saw in Chapter 1, represents a "do-good" trend in neoliberal television policy.
Fox has also played up the public-service dimensions of Natrrry 911, though not as explicitly.
However, both programs "instruct" within a commercial rationality of maximizing profits by earning
high ratings. The fusion of commerce, expertise, morality and entrepreneurial techniques of the self
make these programs another example of how reality TV has reinvented social work.

lusfrafim 2.3 Mothers are taught how to manage their homes and discipline their children more
effectively on Supernanny (Ricochet Productions for ABC, 2006)
Supernaruay promises to relieve the stress of family life with promotions that ask "Are your kids a
handful?" "Are you exhausted?" "Is your house a `zoo'?" But if the show makes ordinary household
difficulties more visible, it ignores their material context, including long work hours, inadequate
daycare, the "double shift" of paid work and housework for women, and the lack of flextime policies
and other reforms that truly would make life easier to manage for many people, including parents. The
program also focuses almost exclusively on "helping" heterosexual nuclear families, so that
techniques for managing the family and the home are situated within this sanctioned ideal. Like Nanny
911, Superuauuy promotes obedience and responsibility in children, and attempts to instill rational
ways of developing these attributes. While there is no formal link between the nanny programs and
official policy, their focus on "old-fashioned" household dynamics echoes the philosophy of
"compassionate conservatism." George W. Bush has promoted welfare reform on the grounds that the
"feel-good, permissive values of the 1960s undermined the strength of families and helped create
dependency on government," which ultimately harmed low-income populations.31 Besides giving rise
to student rebellions and countercultures, the 1960s were also an era when so-called lenient parenting
techniques gained currency. Nanny TV reverses this image by guiding and regularizing government
inside the home. While the shows "help" middle-class families, as opposed to welfare citizens, the
impetus to undo the permissive family value system responsible for "dependency" in policy rhetoric
can be seen in the techniques and skills offered to parents (especially mothers) who are enlisted to
govern their children in the name of domestic harmony.
The program opens with Jo Frost in a posh English cab, watching video footage of the week's needy
family on her laptop computer. With her British accent, authoritative demeanor, and nostalgic Mary
Poppins-like appearance (matronly dress suit, tight bun, umbrella), she's marked as "different" from

the masses of female childcare workers, devalued as they are in the United States as well as Britain.
That's important, because after observing "family dynamics" and taking mental notes for a brief
period, Frost diagnoses flawed parenting habits and implements a new system of strategies and rules.
After explaining where the adults have gone wrong, she offers a solution that is part social work, part
parenting education, and part domestic science. No matter how large the problem, it can be overcome
with a household routine, a list of household rules, and a methodical approach to handling the
children's misbehavior. However, achieving domestic order does take considerable effort: "It's a
tough lesson for a parent to retrain themselves," explains one frazzled mother.
The episodes are all very similar, with a revolving cast of exhausted mothers, peripheral fathers, and
preschool children who bicker with siblings, talk back to parents, snack between meals, and throw
temper tantrums. Since the double shift is still deeply gendered, Frost pitches lessons in domestic
time-management mainly to the mothers, who often work full-time while also managing the children
and the household. In one episode, Mom manages the family plumbing business from home, while also
doing the housework and caring for two preschoolers. She's wiped out to the point of tears, but the
program promises to "fix her broken spirit" in less than two weeks. Toward that end, Frost
systematizes the mother's workday with a color-coded, wall-sized schedule, allowing several hours
"off" from the business to focus exclusively on the misbehavior-prone children (the time is made up in
the evening when they are in bed). On another episode, Mom works full-time as a telemarketer, while
also keeping house and caring for preschool twins and a 9-year old. She thought working from home
would give her more "mommy time" (and reduce childcare costs), but her "flexible" job has become a
living nightmare. We see her perched at the living-room computer taking calls on a headset while the
children run amok; when the inevitable squabbles and mishaps force her to abandon her work station,
she worries out loud that her boss will fire her. At the end of the day, she's so tired she falls asleep
with the children, leaving her husband feeling abandoned and single ("unacceptable," according to
Frost, who fails to suggest that he help out more). While it remains unclear exactly how an improved
household routine can help this woman, there's no mention of hiring a babysitter, let alone government
or corporate reforms such as subsidized daycare. Like other life interventions performed by
television, Supernanny values self-reliance over "dependency" and social upheaval.
While household routines are important, a properly self-governing family also requires that children
know and follow rules. At least one child per episode is branded as a chronic misbehaver, and the
problem is attributed to faulty parenting. Occasionally parents are lectured for shouting and/or using
force, but most of the time they're charged with too much softness and leniency. To "prevent bad
habits" from breeding and show kids that the "adults are in charge," Frost establishes a non-negotiable
set of household rules (no sassing, no aggressive play, no picky eating) and shows parents how to
enforce them rationally. Each week, she demonstrates the same step-by-step approach to discipline,
beginning with a "warning in a low tone" and culminating with a punitive trip to the "naughty mat" (the
information also appears in captions that extend the lesson to TV viewers at home). While the
punishments on Nanny 911 vary, the program adheres to the same notion that "ACTIONS HAVE
CONSEQUENCES: Good behavior is rewarded. Bad behavior comes with penalties." Frost
demonstrates "tried-and-tested" methods for regularizing problem rituals such as bedtime and
encourages children to learn personal responsibility by cleaning their rooms, picking up their toys,

and so on; Nanny 911 is even more focused on developing a work ethic in children, who are given
their own wall charts to keep track of chores. To ensure that the regimen will be properly
implemented in her absence, Frost monitors the home from a distance via remote camera for a few
days; if Moni forgets a disciplinary step or junior decides to climb out of bed, it's all caught on
camera. In the final review session, these mistakes are noted and the process is fine-tuned.
Like other TV interventions, Superuauuy circulates strategies for informal learning through the
acquisition of guidelines and strategies. In doing so, it utilizes procedures (the home visit, video
replay, practice and review sessions) that have become increasingly common on television. All of
these procedures encourage "real" people to objectify their lives in order to pursue the care of the
self. Through television, the self becomes something that can be studied, reflected upon, surveilled
and therefore recalibrated. The process of observing is redoubled on Superuaiiuy as the student relies
upon surveillance cameras in the home to watch over her household and to manage the family, a
process that is crucial to observing the self ever so slightly "from a distance" in order to see what
needs to be done. This pulls the nanny/teacher (who has observed the family's problems on video)
and the parent/student out of the immediate situation only to reimmerse them as both actors and
watchers. The teacher governs at a distance, and the student is disciplined while being proactive and
"free," or governed while governing. This process is important also because it allows for a
customized plan for particular families and individuals. While contemporary TV operates within an
economy of mass customization, the impulse to design programs, plans, and rules that are specific to
individuals and families requires observing and demonstrating in the ways mentioned above what is
most suitable and acceptable to particular individuals - even as TV viewers themselves watch at a
distance, and are slightly removed from the process of customization. Customization occurs not only
because TV has the capacity to create these games of observation - tests with oneself, guided by
experts - but also because TV has become part of networks of support that extend beyond the TV set
to web sites, magazines, and books.

Supenianny adopts a paternalistic role in the name of facilitating selfempowerment. The goal is for
parents to learn to manage on their own, so Frost can move on to other needy families. The program
promises to equip parents with the skills they need to improve their lives as well as their families,
and in so doing allows for a range of viewing strategies, from emotional identification with the
harried mothers to relief that one's own children are not quite as out of control as the ones being
documented by the TV cameras. However, none of this prevents the program from operating as an
informal technology of government, a role that is facilitated by the parenting tips dispensed on the
Supenlanny web site as well as Frost's bestselling how-to parenting book (Nanny 911 features a
similar web site and how-to merchandise). What is important about the program as a life intervention
is how it links care of the self (and of one's children) to a template for government that draws from
residual welfare strategies but is actualized within the logic of commerce. It is worth emphasizing that
the responsibilized, rule-abiding and (eventually) self-governing children Supernanny teaches parents
to help produce are the sort of citizens-in-training that neoliberalism depends upon.

Chapter 3

Makeover TV:
Labors of Reinvention
In spring 2005, the TV makeover program What Not to Wear presented a special episode called
"Worst Dressed Women in Government." Filmed in Washington, DC, it casts a critical eye on women
who work for the capital's public sector bureaucracies.
Hidden cameras zoom in on the style faux pas of an entire city filled with ill-fitting pantsuits,
oversized floral dresses, and dated hairstyles, implying that big government produces a static work
culture, an "iron cage" with little incentive for self-fashioning or fashion change. The woman with the
dubious achievement of being crowned the best example of this institutionalized anti-style is treated
to a sophisticated new wardrobe, a designer haircut and a professional makeup application. More
importantly, she is presented with a set of customized "rules" to guide her in a lifelong pursuit of selffashioning after the TV cameras have moved on. While What Not to Wear offers these services to
every fashion "don't" who appears on the program, this woman's need for television's help is
explicitly tied to the assumption that government epitomizes an approach to work that is dull,
uninspiring, predictable, and permanent - and therefore out of touch with fashion as a signifier of
freedom, marketability, innovation, and personality. By developing the woman's capacity to groom
and outfit herself to her own advantage, the episode implicitly promises to transform a passive
employee into an energized entrepreneur of her vocational future. What Not to Wear focuses on the
minutiae of personal style and appearance, but its political rationality is in sync with changes in the
regulation of work and workers. Like many of the makeover programs that have appeared on
television since the millennium, it translates the demands of the neoliberal economy - flexibility,
shortterm labor, outsourcing, ongoing corporate reinvention, and a shift from production to branding into people's capacities to carry out the new requirements of work being placed on them. As cultural
theorist Valerie Walkerdine explains,
Jobs for life are being replaced by a constantly changing array of jobs, small businesses and
employment contracts. In such an economy, it is the flexible and autonomous subject who is demanded
to be able to cope with constant change in work, income and lifestyle and with constant insecurity. It
is the flexible and autonomous subject who negotiates, chooses, succeeds in the array of education
and retraining forms that form the new "lifelong learning" and the "multiple career trajectories" that
have replaced the linear hierarchies of the education system of the past and the jobs for life of the old
economy ... it is argued that these times demand a subject who is capable of constant self-invention.
Such a subject is presumed by, as well as being the intended product of, contemporary forms of
education and training.'
Reality TV's approach to "making over" the self may not be exactly what US Federal Reserve
chairman Alan Greenspan had in mind when he spoke in 2000 of the need for "lifelong learning" to
prepare US workers for a current economy that values rapid innovation, flexible labor markets, and
entrepreneurship: The "heyday when a high school or college education would serve a graduate for a
lifetime is gone; basic credentials, by themselves, are not enough to ensure success in the workplace,"

said Greenspan, who called upon community colleges and vocational retraining and "retooling"
programs to bolster the nation's competitive edge and soothe an anxious labor force, an agenda that
was adopted by the administration of George W. Bush. Yet, reality TV has developed its own version
of lifelong education as a solution to the disappearance of "jobs for life," the rapid obsolescence of
job skills, and the social insecurities that accompany these shifts. From programs that teach people
how to improve their looks, personality, and social skills, to makeover competitions that transform
raw human potential into the next top model, multimillionaire, or American idol, reality TV presents
work on the self as a prerequisite for personal and professional success. Unlike vocational training, it
presents this lesson inside a pleasurable lifestyle game whose "rules" can be mastered and possibly
even exploited by individuals. On What Not to Wear, fashion victims accept being ridiculed and
bossed around by snobbish experts because their stylistic rehabilitation is offered in the form of a
playful challenge that incorporates many opportunities for their own participation, rebellion,
amusement, suspense, and reward. Despite its reliance on harsh pedagogical strategies, including
humiliation and surveillance, the program acts as if it were on the side of the anxious individual in a
larger game of Opportunity, Inc. It offers selffashioning as a form of self-enterprising, not something
the made-over person owes her boss or any other authority figure. What Not to Wear illustrates the
paradox of makeover TV, in that it prepares the worker to take on burdens of insecurity and
disposability in the name of her/ his own freedom, and provides them with tenuous resources for
navigating the impossibility of this task.
Self-Fashioning in the Flexible Economy
The most obvious example of self-fashioning on television is the beauty/style makeover. Once
relegated to the margins of daytime talk shows, this type of programming entered the mainstream with
the debut of Extreme Makeover on ABC in 2003, and The Swan in 2005 on Fox. The beauty/style
makeover has also become a staple of many large cable channels, including The Learning Channel,
UPN, MTV, and The Style network, which keep episodes of A Makeover Story, Ambush Makeover,
Teti Years Younger, Made, How Do I Look, and other programs in frequent rotation. The beauty/style
makeover, which aims to transform "ordinary" people into improved versions of themselves using
tactics from cosmetic surgery to stylish new clothes, is often criticized on two grounds: The first is
that the programs reject any distinction between content and commerce, so that they effectively serve
as "advertorial" for the fashion and beauty industries. The second is that makeover programs
perpetuate existing gender and social hierarchies by imposing restrictive notions of beauty and taste
on women and the working/lower-middle classes.2 Both arguments are convincing, but they don't
address what is specifically new about reality TV's approach to the makeover, which has, after all,
been a theme in Hollywood films, women's magazines, and tabloid journalism for many decades.
Television's cultural conventions, including its use of close-ups and formulaic narratives, make it
especially useful for demonstrating techniques of self-fashioning in the form of dramatic stories that
incorporate moments of intimacy, disruption, and suspense. The fusion of instruction in the aesthetics
of appearance and style with familiar elements of popular fiction produces a hybrid educational/
entertainment format that addresses the viewer in different ways from the selfhelp book or the
magazine. The viewer is allowed to observe the diagnosis and "improvement" of others from a

distance without feeling as if she/he has set about to learn something. Most makeover programs also
allow for multiple and fairly complex viewing strategies that range from emotional identification with
the fashion victim, to taking on the rehabilitation work of the experts and judges and possibly judging
oneself above the people who are being made over, to ironic detachment, to a combination of these
positions. Finally, television's embrace of the beauty/style makeover matters because TV is more in
sync with the rhythms of everyday life than other media, and even its nicheoriented dimension is
capable of normalizing the makeover as part of an everyday, "real-life" common culture in ways that
other media have not been able to accomplish. Partly this has to do with the way in which television
has brought a broader range of "ordinary" people together (including men, people of varied ages, and
people who do not read fashion magazines) as good candidates for a makeover. However, it also has
to do with television's capacity to enter the home as a regularized source of entertainment and
information that is continually available for casual observation as well as "appointment" viewing. In
many homes, the TV set is habitually on, and the shift toward the constant recycling of its cultural
output, particularly on cable channels, means that many TV viewers are likely to be familiar with
makeover programs whether they intentionally seek them out or not. TV brings the makeover more
deeply into the fabric of daily life, and for that reason is able to circulate its logics and rules more
broadly and also more informally than books, magazines, the internet, or other media.
Makeover TV is a more regularized and ritualized technology for "governing at a distance," or the
dispersed strategies that guide and shape conduct in liberal societies and enable individuals to
perform this role for themselves independently of formal state powers and authorities. In this chapter,
we argue that by instilling rationales and techniques for fashioning the self, reality TV also works in
indirect (and sometimes contradictory) ways to guide and govern workers and to facilitate their selfgovernment in the flexible economy. Here we extend our focus on governmentality to several
examples of makeover TV, including the beauty/style makeover and the TV job interview/ talent
contest. We situate these formats as cultural technologies for governing citizens who are expected not
only to take care of themselves, but are called upon to perform as what sociologist Paul du Gay calls
"entrepreneurs of the self' within a deregulated capitalist economy that devalues organized labor and
job security. Although makeover programs are not only (or even primarily) focused on people's
vocational lives, they do make promises about TV's capacity to help the unemployed and/or
unfulfilled help themselves as managers of their "greatest assets" - themselves. They convey the idea
that the quickest route to success is "strategic" self-fashioning, a practice that includes remaking one's
body, personality, and image in calculated ways to bring about personal advantage in a competitive
marketplace. By bringing demonstrations of the skills and procedures required to achieve "selfrenovation," "impression-management," and "total transformation" into the home as reality
entertainment, TV links the makeover game to mastering the uncertainties of everyday life.
The growth of makeover TV as a forum for displaying and enticing the labor involved in the stylistic
retooling of the self speaks in part to what Angela McRobbie calls a "replacement of the social with
work." As the public sector and, with it, social services are "relegated to the margins of
contemporary life," she explains, they are replaced with "competition, the seeking of selfadvancement in work, and, in commercialized leisure spheres, self-improvement techniques." Work
comes to mean more than earning a living: Promoted as the sole means of ensuring personal security,

work "incorporates and overtakes everyday life" and exacts "new resources of self-reliance on the
part of the working population."3 We saw evidence of this in the entrepreneurial forms of social work
developed by reality TV in Chapter 2. TV programs like Starting Over contribute to the official
strategies of "getting people into work" (such as welfare-to-work schemes) that become the very
"definition of government" in McRobbie's analysis. We also saw how some of reality TV's
"suggested" techniques of the self, including self-esteem, everyday personal managerialism, and
lifestyle auditing, attempt to cultivate the will to work - and to work on the self - as a way of
overcoming public-sector "dependency." The beauty/style makeover is a less didactic component of
the cultural regulation of work, and while it focuses on external appearances it has much in common
with the governing strategies discussed so far. As the self-help guru, daytime talk-show host and
Extreme Makeover consultant Dr. Phil explains, life interventions and beauty/style makeovers are
intersecting components of the same self-shaping process: one works on the "inside," the other on the
"outside."
Reality TV's promotion of self-fashioning as a requirement of work also speaks to shifts in
managerial philosophy. In her study of the "career guides" turned out by the self-help publishing
industry, Micki McGee traces a shift from the "organizational culture of the 1950s, where people
were trained to work in hierarchical corporate context," to the present, when workers are expected to
manage themselves and, increasingly, to achieve security "by identifying with capital" - by imagining
themselves as "entrepreneurs, as the "CEOs of Me, Inc."' In his book Management Challenges for the
21" Century, corporate management guru Peter Drucker (who has also been instrumental in the
"reinvention of government" and was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush
in 2002) describes this shift in terms of greater individual freedom, empowerment, and choice. A few
decades ago, he writes, a person "was born into a job and into a line of work" and trapped there for
life. Today, people have "choices" - they can decide their line of work, and they can change jobs and
occupations if they wish. To make effective use of their freedom to choose, however, workers must
better understand their individual strengths and weaknesses, and they must "learn to develop
themselves." This is essential, for they are now free to plan their own careers - to do by themselves
and for themselves what the "Personnel Department of the large organization was supposed to do in
the 1950s and 1960s." According to Drucker, the most profound change to come out of this
transformation is that workers are now called upon to "manage themselves" rather than relying on
their employers to do it: "Managing Oneself is a REVOLUTION in human affairs. It requires new and
unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker. For in effect it
demands that each knowledge worker think and behave as a Chief Executive Officer."'
According to Tom Peters, managerial strategist and author of "This Brand Called You," becoming an
entrepreneur of the self is akin to branding oneself. "Regardless of age, regardless of position,
regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding.
We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be
head marketer for the brand called You."6 Like Drucker, Peters translates the burdens of the flexible
economy, particularly the loss of job security, into the capacities and desires of workers who are
reconceptualized as "free agents." He writes:
Behemoth companies may take turns buying each other or acquiring every hot startup that catches their

eye - mergers in 1996 set records ... but the real action is at the other end: the main chance is
becoming a free agent in an economy of free agents, looking to have the best season you can imagine
in your field, looking to do your best work and chalk up a remarkable track record, and looking to
establish your own micro equivalent of the Nike swoosh.
Within the flexible economy, the individual is no longer an "employee," "staffer," "worker," or
"human resource," but has become his/her own branded commodity. Within this logic, work on the
self is the equivalent of building and accruing capital:
You don't "belong to" any company for life, and your chief affiliation isn't to any particular "function."
You're not defined by your job title and you're not confined by your job description. Starting today
you are a brand ... The good news ... is that everyone has a chance to stand out. Everyone has a chance
to learn, improve, and build up their skills. Everyone has a chance to be a brand worthy of the mark.
Beauty/style makeovers are increasingly offered as an important dimension of the process of "selfimprovement" required to enterprise and brand oneself in the sphere of work. Reality TV's embrace
of the makeover in these terms endorses and enables what Toby Miller calls the "spread of selffashioning as a requirement of personal and professional achievement through the U.S. middle class
labor force."' However, we shouldn't generalize too broadly, because makeover programs address
their "targets" in different ways and allow them varying amounts of "freedom." Extreme Makeover
operates within ABC's broader turn to privatized charity and community outreach (addressed in
Chapter 1) by providing "worthy" individuals with complimentary cosmetic surgeries, dental work,
Lasik eye surgery, professional styling, and recovery "vacations" at the Extreme Makeover mansion.
It works on the needy, offering instantaneous aesthetic improvement as a form of social service. The
idea is that by bolstering their looks and therefore their self-esteem, individuals can jump-start
success in other areas of life, including work and dating. To qualify for Extreme Makeover's help,
candidates usually must have self-described physical "flaws" as well as life hardships (i.e., death of
a loved one, job loss, psychological distress) which they hope to resolve through a personal
makeover. As Vicki Mayer notes, people may apply for "unsanctioned" reasons such as obtaining free
dental and vision work, but this complexity is flattened by the program's narrative. By facilitating
these dual desires (for physical as well as emotional/professional/ social improvement), Extreme
Makeover dislodges the pursuit of beautification from potential negative connotations (vanity, selfabsorption, impossible beauty standards, advertising's exploitative pull) and situates it as an integral
component of self-empowerment. When Evelyn, "a 29-year-old waitress and single mother struggling
to raise three kids," is offered a tummy tuck, liposuction of the inner and outer thighs, breast
augmentation, and "teeth whitened and straightened," it is understood that she will then capitalize on
the extreme makeover to overcome (through marriage and/or work) her personal situation. Likewise,
for Candace, a "family support worker and mother of two" in her thirties, a lifetime of being teased
about her looks has come to matter more in recent years, because she wishes to "re-enter the job
market." Candace feels that a makeover will boost her employability, and the Extreme team agrees.
The program follows a paternalistic approach to the care of the self, as the doctors decide how to
improve Candace's appearance and perform their work with little creative input from her. Ultimately,
however, it is Candace who must perform the work of recovering from the upper eyelid lift, brow lift,
nose reshaping, cheek implants, lower eyelid-tightening, breast augmentation, liposuction on thighs

and stomach, and extensive dental work. Her swollen features, bandages, and obvious pain are
testimony to the labor she is willing to invest in her future.
Extreme Makeover presumes that the right outward appearance, defined by dominant ideologies and
filtered through professional doctors and style experts, can bolster an individual's advantage in an
unstable, youth-oriented labor market. For women and increasingly for men as well, looks are also
understood as a form of currency in the postfeminist dating and marriage market. Extreme Makeover
does not invent these assumptions, as much as it enacts an extreme solution to a "truth" that circulates
in a range of venues, from popular media to social science. Sociobiologist Nancy Etcoff sums up this
discourse in her widely cited book Survival of the Prettiest, contending that "goodlooking men are
more likely to get hired, at a higher salary, and to be promoted faster than unattractive men," while
"homely women ... are truly disadvantaged economically - they are less likely to get hired or to earn
competitive salaries at work. They are less likely to marry, and less likely if they do to marry a man
with resources."8 Whether or not EtcofFs claims are accurate is ultimately less important than the
way in which social anxieties triggered by a perceived link between appearance and work are being
exploited by beauty experts and marketers, who now offer regimens for refashioning that collapse
boundaries between everyday life and work. As McRobbie observes, a burgeoning culture of
"pampering yourself' with beauty treatments, body-toning programs, and cosmetic surgery is now
being marketed as a "resource to be mined for added values which can enhance performance in the
workplace." This is said to be especially important in the service sector, which has replaced
manufacturing as a source of low and mid-level employment, and which in some segments (including
retail) "now expects its workforce to look especially attractive and stylish for what they label
`aesthetic labor.' " Such is the case with Peter, a 25-year-old fast-food manager who feels his looks
have "attributed to his solitary life, his stalled career and his shyness," and who looked to Extreme
Makeover to "break out of his shell and bring out his inner rock star."
The need to remain "up to date" in appearance, particularly for middle-aged populations, is tied to
stability and success at work by Extreme Makeover and other makeover programs, including those
that offer minor treatments and professional restyling services in lieu of surgical intervention. The
impetus to signify youth is a cultural dimension of the current stage of "flexible capitalism." As
sociologist Richard Sennett describes it, "rigid forms of bureaucracy are under attack, as are the evils
of blind routine. Workers are asked to behave nimbly, to be open to change on short notice, to take
risks continually, to become ever less dependent on regulations and formal procedures." While
flexibility is claimed to give people more "freedom to shape their lives," Sennett contends that it
merely "substitutes new controls," including the expectation that workers adapt and retool to meet the
continually changing demands placed on them. Youth is valuable to "flexible organizations" because
older workers are thought to have "inflexible mind sets" and be "risk averse," as well as "lacking in
the sheer physical energy needed to cope with the demands of life in the flexible workplace.""'
According to Drucker, the solution is to "learn to stay young and mentally alive during a fifty-year
working life." Just as the worker will have to "learn how and when to change what they do, how they
do it and when they do it," they will have to conmlu- nicate their adaptability and flexibility by
cultivating a youthful appearance.'' Extreme Makeover assists by footing the bill for facelifts, hair
transplants, and other procedures in the hopes of boosting stagnant careers. In one episode, Samantha,

a 55-year-old high-school counselor and single mother with a long history of "trying to make ends
meet," turns to Extreme Makeover for a "new lease on life." She wants to advance her career, but is
worried that "no company will invest thousands of dollars" in an employee who looks as old and
tired as she does. When Samantha is granted a face lift, neck lift, and full dental restoration, it is
under the assumption that such techniques will bolster the worth of her iinage, which has become so
important to the ethos of worker-as-brand/commodity. When Arthur, a "self-employed business
development consultant" in his late fifties, lost his "job, his wife and his savings in a short period of
time" and experienced an "emotional roller coaster" that took a negative toll on his looks, he also
turned to Extreme Makeover for help. According to the program's narrative, having made the decision
that it was "time to pick himself back up," Arthur hoped the makeover would "be the bridge that
[would] help him get his life back on track." When two decades of stress and overtime as a crimescene investigator appear on the face of 48-yearold Peggy, she too is rejuvenated by Extreme
Makeover. The program completes its work in time for Peggy's "upcoming work anniversary party,"
where she is revealed to her colleagues as an earlier version of herself, whose years of experience
have been erased, and who is ready to begin anew.
Makeovers as Instructional Games
Teti Years Younger (The Learning Channel) takes a more participatory approach to the aesthetic
management of age by fusing techniques of self-fashioning to conventions of gaining. The program
eschews surgical techniques but requires more involvement and "maintenance" work from the madeover subject. At the beginning of each episode, an individual is asked to stand in a glass box on a
busy public street or in a shopping mall, while random passersby guess their age and comment on
what is it about their appearance that "gives it away." The average guess becomes the starting point
for the style experts, who claim to use "simple, nonsurgical techniques to take a decade off the
participant's looks in just ten days." The voyeurism inherent to the glass-box ritual, coupled with the
ostensibly uncertain outcome of the race to rejuvenate the individual, provide an entertaining context
for dispensing advice that can be customized and carried out through personal regimens at home. Teti
Years Younger differs from Extreme Makeover in two important ways: First, it demands more
learning from the individual, who must become informed about the latest dermatology and dental
treatments as well as the way in which makeup application techniques, hairstyles, and clothing can be
utilized in precise ways to signify youth. This lesson is extended to the TV viewer-pupil at home, who
even when focused on the entertainment dimensions of the show inevitably learns something about a
whole spectrum of anti-aging techniques. Second, Teti Years Younger links the need for a youthful
image to personal fulfillment as well as survival at work, and this breadth, combined with a focus on
minor improvements rather than extreme overhauls, creates a wider address for its "empowering"
advice and services. The need to maintain a pleasing appearance, and to deal with signs of aging as
they come up, is presented as an ethical obligation to the self in ways that evoke Foucault's analysis of
the care of the self in ancient Greece. As Foucault argued, the ancients were enticed to work on and
"master" themselves in practical as well as aesthetically pleasing ways, so that living one's life
became akin to creating a work of art. Teti Years Younger also presents aesthetic work on the self as
a "quality of life" issue that anyone (with the help of experts) can master and enjoy. Unlike ancient
Greece, however, the care of the self that is promoted by Teti Years Younger and other makeover

programs is inseparable from commerce. The required props - spa services, cosmetics, designer
clothes, and so on - ensure that the rewards of self-fashioning are dependent on the marketplace, even
as the individual is also required to labor in their proper application and strategic use. Self-mastery
over style becomes reliant on the ability to correctly choose from a vast display of consumer goods.
In addition to excluding those who cannot pay for it, this entrepreneurial approach to the care of the
self works in tandem with the discourse of personal responsibility, which means that the invitation to
pursue self-fulfillment through "acts of choice in a world of goods" can become a burden in disguise.
Within the context of the flexible economy, as McGee argues, the mastery involved in "engineering
one's image" can't really be separated from the impetus to "commodify oneself... [by] keeping oneself
marketable in a volatile labor market, or mastering the contingencies of the labor market.""
What Not to Wear, which originated on the BBC and also appears in a US version on The Learning
Channel, illustrates the entrepreneurial aspects of self-fashioning on television in two senses. The
more obvious way is by serving as a forum to display brands, stores, labels, and product placements
(including What Not to Wear merchandise), and therefore consumerism in general. The program also
seeks to instill self-entrepreneurialism through micro-practices of self-fashioning that aren't easily
reducible to the spread of consumer culture, however. Stylish contemporary images crafted via the
right clothing, hairstyles, makeup, and accessories become strategic resources for maximizing
performance within and across social situations, including work. Individuals nominated for the style
makeovers by friends, family, or coworkers are secretly filmed then confronted by the program's
hosts, who promise them a new wardrobe and professional styling services if they agree to acquire
fashion sense. The program is built on a pseudoauthoritarianism in which the hosts ridicule the
fashion victims, force them to model their most dated and ill-fitting clothes, toss much of their existing
wardrobe in the garbage, instill the rules of their "new look," and monitor from a distance as the pupil
shops for the appropriate outfits. However, this is done in the name of fun, and the gaming element
takes the edge off the disciplinary dimensions of the program. What Not to Wear relies on strategies
of close supervision, humiliation, and surveillance only as a means to an end, which is the creation of
a self-governing subject. The targets must be taught how to fashion themselves as a means to making
the most of themselves, and this prod toward personal empowerment (not unlike the rhetoric
surrounding welfare-to-work schemes) justifies the need for harsh tactics.
The self-work exacted by What Not to Wear relies on video technology to draw the participant into
the makeover process in sophisticated ways that printed media cannot accomplish. The made-over
subject is recorded watching the surveillance footage of themselves while the experts point out their
fashion faux pas in a joking tone that, nonetheless, forces a "live" reassessment of the self and a
consideration of how one is perceived through the eyes of others. The self becomes objectified, as the
subject is required to assume a detached view of him/herself, which allows the process of expertguided selfwork to begin. The subjects are then told to record personal video diaries at home, in
which they document their responses to the makeover process, not all of which are positive. Snippets
from these diaries are interspersed throughout the episode, adding an element of authenticity and
complexity to the pedagogical process, as feelings of embarrassment, shame, and insecurity are often
voiced during the selfrecordings. The subject is also recorded and observed "at a distance" so the
experts can monitor her/his progress. The grainy surveillance images are displayed on a monitor for

the trainee and the TV viewer at home to see as well, all of which lends a feeling of being watched
and "watched over" throughout the training period. The subject is then charged with internalizing all
of these objective and personalized strategies, evoking memories of the clandestine video, the selfcreated diaries, and the surveillance footage to continue work on the self in private. While What Not
to Wear was an early adopter of the integration of self-shaping and video, many other shows now use
similar hidden camera and surveillance techniques, so that television itself has become part of the
makeover process in ways that were unimaginable only ten years ago.

Illustration 3. 1 Professional stylists use closed-circuit video to make sure shoppers follow fashion
rules on What Not to Wear (Granada/BBC for The Learning Channel, 2005)
The manifesto What You Wear Can Change Your Life by BBC hosts Trinny and Susannah explicitly
situates the beauty/style makeover as a cultural technology for empowering women to empower
themselves. "So many of us trundle through life not making the most of ourselves because we are
lacking in self-confidence, convinced that clothes don't matter or have no idea where to begin," they
write. Fortunately, "every lady on our show has turned into a gleaming example of confidence ...
[Women] know that at the end of the day the way we look can influence so much in our lives. Looking

sexy makes us feel sexy. Looking professional helps us get that job." The BBC version, in particular,
draws from postfeminist discourse to encourage women to see beyond what "they hate about their
bodies" and make the most of their looks using little techniques, such as choosing the correct hues and
styles for one's body type. This advice is not intended to dismantle "ways of seeing" women as
objects to be looked at in the sense theorized by John Berger, but it does encourage them to become
entrepreneurial surveyors of themselves who are able to "minimize" flaws and "maximize" assets
using every technique available, including the "art of camouflage." The pursuit of aesthetic selfmastery is to be accomplished by adhering to a customized set of "dos and don'ts" established by style
experts who take into consideration the woman's age, lifestyle, occupation, and body type. Not unlike
the self-managed worker, she must accept these rules and learn to enforce them upon herself in order
to reap the rewards of the makeover game, which extend beyond the traditional pursuit of male
approval to accomplishment and "choice" in the professional realm. The "competitive workmates can
be kept in the dark as to why you look thinner, sleeker, more sophisticated," advise Trinny and
Susannah. "This is your secret weapon.""
The US version is even more concerned with remaking women and also men whose personal style
hinders their capacities to achieve satisfaction and success at work. Colleagues often nominate such
targets, enable the secret filming, and are present during the final reveal, further bolstering the
informal association between the TV makeover and the workplace. The need to keep one's
appearance contemporary emerges as a major concern in these episodes, and people who are "stuck"
in a time warp are a recurring theme. Donna, a 47-year-old "sales rep for a printing company on Long
Island," cannot hope to progress beyond talking to "clients on the phone" in her seasonal items and
1970s leftovers, "including sweaters with pumpkins, fall leaves and ice skaters." What Not to Wear
intervenes, "culling the most horrific items and forcing her to face how bad these clothes look on her
in a 360-degree mirror." Donna is sent shopping with "strict new rules and $5,000, before a complete
hair and makeup overhaul." However, as is often the case, uncertainty mounts because "Donna's been
dressing like a Christmas tree for a long time. Can she learn simplicity and style - on one short
week?"
People who are new to work or who are experiencing stalled careers are also recurring targets for a
personal style makeover. A would-be professional who is nearly "30 years old," Dave's problem is
that he is still wearing clothes he bought when he was in college. They're worn and out of date, which
prevents him from projecting an adult persona. In her mid-twenties, "Morna still dresses like a
slouchy college student. She works for a major cosmetics company in Manhattan's classy Rockefeller
Center - but in billowing skirts, wornout sandals and an actual headband." Shannon "works as a
telephone salesperson, but she's about to leave her desk and come face to face with her customers,"
which raises the issue of her appearance: Her work colleagues, who have nominated her for the
makeover, are worried she "won't be making commission unless she looks more professional." Kerry,
a "33-year-old opera singer on the edge of a flourishing career," performs wonderfully but looks as if
she's "just come off the farm" with her "balloon-like sweaters, ill-fitting pants, 99-cent panties, and
`virgin' hair that has never been cut or colored." The clock ticks: Can the stylists "manage to help the
opera diva hit the high note?" In all of these episodes, What Not to Wear introduces an expert-led
behavioral regime for empowering oneself at work by learning (quite literally) to dress the part

within a compressed time frame that brings a sense of urgency to this mission.
What Not to Wear promotes consumerism, but not in the sense suggested by the political-economic
critique of makeover TV. Following a long line of advertising criticism, concerns about "advertorial"
and the glorification of shopping tend to presume a passive subject whose consumption is fueled
through a manipulation of unconscious desires. In fact, What Not to Wear promotes a deliberately
"rational" approach to consumption that seeks to correct irrational and "impulse" shopping,
particularly among women, and therefore has much in common with the history of consumer education
as a cultural technology for guiding wise purchasing habits. What Not to Wear's similarly pedagogical
role is to bring into being the rational and autonomous individual upon which liberalism is based - a
consuming subject who is "free" to advance his or her private interests within the marketplace. This
"freedom" is crucial to the concept of liberal modernity, contends Don Slater, to the extent that
"private, individual resources were also defined in terms of the interests of the individual, which only
he could know and which he had every right to pursue. Consumer choice is merely the mundane
version of this broader notion of private, individual freedom."" Through its training dimensions, What
Not to Wear extends this historically male, bourgeois model of liberal consumption to the female
masses, the object of advertisinginduced gullibility and irrationality within so much critical
discourse. It promises to bring women into liberalism's conception of the enlightened, self-governing
individual - provided the program's selffashioning rules are learnt and followed. The paradox, as
Foucault noted of liberalism in general, is that the "freedom" to practice rational and wise
consumption with an eye toward advancing one's self-interests remains contingent on ever specialized
technologies of consumer expertise.
The elaborate set of customized rules to be followed, which encompass everything from selecting the
proper cut of pants for one's body to seeking out acceptable color palettes for one's skin tone and hair
coloring, turns shopping into a form of work that is rarely pleasurable for the subjects being made
over by What Not to Wear. The shopper (who is closely observed by the experts via a remote
camera) must not succumb to uninformed impulses or whimsical desires, nor is she to waste time "just
looking." She must instead carefully evaluate every potential purchase on the basis of its capacity to
bolster the strategic fashion regimen that has been established for her. Price and brands are non-issues
(the TV program is after all paying), and in that sense "rational shopping" becomes another way of
valorizing expensive merchandise on the basis of expert-valued attributes (quality, cut, etc.) as
opposed to the meanings, identities, and associations that link brands to consumer desire in the
vocabulary of advertising. On What Not to Wear, shopping ceases to be a recreational venue for
escaping the drudgery of work (as in the leisure-time activity of "going to the mall") or for fulfilling
oneself through symbolic commodities, and becomes instead a route to carefully building an image
that is salable in the marketplace of work. The subject must be taught to make calculated choices
about consumer products in ways that evoke Wendy Brown's argument that under neoliberalism, "all
dimensions of human life are cast in terms of a market rationality" that includes not only "submitting
every action and policy to considerations of profitability," but also the production of all human action
as "rational entrepreneurial action. i 15
What Not to Wear and similar makeover programs extend the consumer training provided by
commercial women's magazines, which have long taught women what to buy in the pursuit of outward

beauty. As Ann Cronin argues, consumerism can be seen as a "technology of the self' in that it
promises women "self-transformation and appears to validate women's choices," even as it fuels an
impossible imperative to "be ourselves" by "doing ourselves" mediated by makeup, fashion, dieting,
and exercise. What Not to Wear also addresses the female, in particular, as a subject with an "ethical
duty to monitor [her] appearance" through consumption. However, it situates the exercise of consumer
choice within a slightly different combination of strategic realism and entrepreneurial self-work.
Women are not encouraged to "buy" (or buy into) a fantasy identity as they are through magazines,
which offer airbrushed models as feminine objects of desire. However, nor are they allowed to reject
femininity by adopting an alternative or subcultural style or worse, genderless "nonstyle." The US
version of What Not to Wear in particular targets young and maturing punk rockers, Goths, hippies,
and others who "need" to let go of alternative images. Such candidates are the most likely to rebel
against the rules imposed by the experts, before warming to their "new look" once it has been
assembled for them and valorized by "amazed" friends, family, and work colleagues during the final
reveal. Women who do not shop at all (one episode featured a woman who bought all her clothes at
thrift stores and was shocked to discover the price of urban retail fashion) present another challenge
for the experts, since their unfamiliarity with consumerism provides no basis for behavioral
intervention in personal shopping and styling. Finally, while magazines promote ideals that no fleshand-blood woman can really expect to achieve (although this is beginning to change slightly with
advertising campaigns and fashion spreads featuring "realistic" body sizes), What Not to Wear
conveys the "can-do" philosophy that everyone can make small improvements by sticking to shopping
regimens designed to conceal deficiencies and highlight "assets." Subjects are immersed in the small
details of enterprising self-presentation as determined by experts, so choice becomes the ability to
choose the best option within a realm of weighted possibilities. As BBC hosts Trinny and Susannah
explain, the TV makeover is intended to help women who "want their purchases to change their lives
and are disappointed when they don't." They do not need to be thin or beautiful to "empower"
themselves, nor is the program's goal to magically transform women (or men) into fantasy figures who
embody these attributes. Managing the body becomes a matter of learning how to apply technical
knowledge, skills, and consumer tricks (how to make the legs appear longer, how to conceal a tummy)
in the short term, before pounds have been lost or other long-term changes have been achieved. In all
of these ways, What Not to Wear offers consumer training that is more technical, enterprising, and
laborious than the "mental work" of imagining a future desirable self through advertising imagery.16
Like other makeover programs, What Not to Wear allows for the possibility of multiple viewing
strategies. The TV viewer is not required to adopt the subordinate position of an unstylish pupil, but
can also participate as a vicarious expert who takes pleasure in judging others and seeing one's own
self-fashioning skills valorized. However, this doesn't preclude the viewer from approaching the
intricate and often customizable advice on offer as a personal resource, nor does it preclude
receptivity to dispositions and habits (professionalism, adaptability, innovation, flexibility,
contemporariness) to be achieved through fashion and style. The invitation to learn and, more
importantly, to apply what one has learned from the TV program to one's own life is enhanced by the
convergence of television with other media. If television is a common and regularized technology of
self-fashioning, it increasingly works in tandem with a network of other more specialized cultural
technologies, including how-to books, mobile phones, magazines, and the Web. These "converged"

technologies are often (but not necessarily) traceable to the same corporate parent, and in that sense
self-fashioning on TV is bound up in strategies of corporate crosspromotion and synergy. However,
there is more at stake in television's ties to other media than the devising of ways to direct consumers
from one product to another within the same network of corporate ownership. Convergence also
enables formerly discrete media to form a circuit of cultural technologies for shaping and guiding
conduct, with each medium serving as a cultural relay to similar "governing" strategies presented in
different (including interactive) forms. This enables the "empowering" mission of the programs by
extending advice and ways to apply it to viewers who are no longer expected to merely absorb the
TV text, in the old sense of broadcast media. The What Not to Wear viewer can purchase how-to
style books written by the hosts of the programs, can find articles by them in magazines, and can log
onto the What Not to Wear sites, where style quizzes, customized tip sheets, before/after photos, chat
rooms, and other interactive components bring them more directly into the makeover game as active
participants. This is also a complex process, however, that hinges less on didactic instruction than on
the playful "empowerment" of the self and others. The BBC's What Not to Wear site, for example,
draws users into the logic of the makeover as subjects and experts. In addition to a detailed version of
the sort of advice circulating on the TV show, the site features "real-life" video submissions sent by
fans of the TV program for constructive critique by other users, who take up the role of the advisor
who explains "what not to wear" to be "cruel to be kind." Finally, convergence has facilitated the
production of a self-governing fashion subject through "on-demand" and mobile services. The
capacity to access the web sites (and with them video clips from the TV shows) across boundaries of
time and space, from computers as well as mobile phones, along with reality TV's trendsetting move
into podcasting and text messaging, has made work on the self a truly ongoing and allencompassing
endeavor. When the BBC encourages What Not to Wear viewers to take cell phones into the dressing
room so they can access on-the-scene advice before making a purchase, the logic of "rational"
consumption as a strategy of self-empowerment escapes any notion of TV's distinct textual
boundaries. The ability to "keep in touch" with the program in an increasingly mobile world is
presented as another dimension of "empowerment," as well as a heightened obligation to live one's
life as a project of self-enterprise.
The Male Makeover and the Feminization of Work
In The Culture of Narcissism, critic Christopher Lasch put a feminine face on the "cult of the self' he
saw overtaking modern life. In a chapter devoted to work, Lasch traced the collapse of a Protestant
work ethic in which "values of industry and thrift held the key to material success and spiritual
fulfillmnent" to a new ethic of "selfpreservation" based on self-entrepreneurialism and contrivance.
The "rhetoric of achievement, of single-minded devotion to the task at hand ... no longer provides an
accurate description of the struggle for personal survival," he argued. Instead, the upwardly mobile
individual advances by "convincing his associates that he possesses the attributes of a winner." Lasch
situated this shift within an "age of diminishing expectations" brought about by post-industrial
capitalismn. Nonetheless, he constructed a deeply gendered moral divide between honest work
(male) on the one hand, and crafty self-promotion (female) on the other. If the industrious and selfreliant Robinson Crusoe once embodied liberalism's "ideal economic man," he argued, the new ideal
was more akin to the manipulative female social climber Moll Flanders. In more graphic terms, Lasch

lamented, "The happy hooker has replaced Horatio Alger." 17

Reality TV's embrace of the personal makeover also speaks to the importance of assembling a
stylized self as a device for enterprising the self in every dimension of social life, including work.
This path to self-advancement is partly rooted in historical discourses and practices of femininity,
which makes it an all too easy target of contempt by male intellectuals like Lasch. As feminist
scholars have shown, the production of femininity is an ongoing endeavor involving constant training
and props, and in that sense it mirrors the perpetual selfinvention and lifelong education promoted by
Greenspan and other officials as the solution to the crisis of "flexible" labor practices. Historically
lacking legitimate opportunities for socioeconomic mobility, women have had to rely on bodily and
social self-improvement as a means to advancement and security within the heterosexual marketplace,
and have often been condemned for doing so (i.e., the golddigger stereotype). Appearance, manners,
charm, and personality could be strategically improved with the help of etiquette books, women's
magazines, charm schools, Hollywood films, and other commercial cultural technologies. Feminine
self-improvement demanded hard work on the part of the individual, but it also came to require an
arsenal of consumer goods. The beauty and fashion industries offered women resources to achieve
"self-actualization" even when the structures of society prohibited their advancement in the spheres of
higher education and work. According to feminist cultural historian Kathy Peiss, "makeup promised
personal transformation, a pledge that sounded deeply in American culture - from conversion
experiences and temperance oaths to the appeals of medicine men and faith healers.... In the coloring
and contouring of facial surfaces, a woman could not only change her looks but remake herself and
her life chances.""
With the rise of liberal feminism and its postfeminist variations, women have been declared "free" to
pursue equal opportunities for advancement through work and are called upon to do so by economic
realities, the decline of the male breadwinner ethic, and official government policies (such as
welfare-to-work requirements). This has caused a partial rupture in the path to feminine
empowerment charted by Peiss, particularly on television. Makeover programs like What Not to
Wear continue to emphasize techniques of self-fashioning, but they are more apt to situate the art of
assembling a marketable self in relation to paid labor, so that wearing the most flattering hairstyle or
cut of trousers is not only a way to snag a desirable man but also, and most importantly, a way to find
and keep a desirable job. Because women continue to face workplace inequalities and obstacles that
contradict the postfeminist promise of freedom and choice, these residual strategies can be
represented as empowering strategies for modern times. At the same time, makeover pageants like
The Swan have emerged to provide extreme versions of the feminine makeover to women who lack
opportunities for succeeding in the contemporary workforce. Meanwhile, men are being brought into
the makeover game as never before, including the beauty/style programs that now appear in record
numbers on television. Men are now expected to perpetually recalibrate themselves in the flexible
economy, which slides into the expectation that they also work on their appearance and "soft" social
and personality skills. As anticipated by Lasch's smirking characterization of the "happy hooker," this
development has triggered anxieties about the encroachment of femininity as well as the promotion of
consumerism and "superficial" work on the self.
We want to avoid reifying the gender hierarchies that often accompany such concerns by emphasizing

the gendering of postindustrialism - a phenomenon that Lasch recognizes, but does not examine. As
Valerie Walkerdine argues, postindustrial service work, which has replaced agriculture and
manufacturing as the mainstay of employment for most people in capitalist societies, requires the
adoption of characteristics (empathy, nurturance, communication, and "to be looked-at ness") that
have historically been deemed female. It is no coincidence, given this economic valuing of femininity,
that the British Labour Party went as far as to declare that when it comes to work the "future is
female," notes Walkerdine. What's more, the "self-invention demanded of workers in the new flexible
economy" requires an entrepreneurial relationship to the self that has much in common with the
enticement to constantly make and remake femininity. What is different is that, as the stability
promised in the traditional work ethic fades, men now "have to face the necessity of constant selfinvention and to produce for themselves a marketable (feminized) image, perhaps for the first time."'"'
If the female worker is now being positioned as the "mainstay of the neoliberal economy," the process
of "retraining" takes on historically feminine dimensions as well, and it is for this reason that the
makeover can be offered to men as well as to women as a way to navigate the new conditions of
work. What has long been demanded of women - to be adaptable, desirable, presentable, consumable
- has been intensified and extended to the postindustrial workforce as a whole, says Walkerdine;
makeover TV helps to foster these attributes.'"
Men are a normalized if secondary concern of many TV makeover programs, where they often appear
as subjects who can no longer rely on a relatively stable path of upward mobility and therefore need
to constantly work on themselves to compete or advance at work. The postindustrial feminization of
work is especially apparent on Queer Eye for the StraiE;ht Guy, which debuted on Bravo in 2004. On
this program, five gay men make over heterosexual men by teaching them grooming, style, culture,
decorating, and gourmet cooking and by introducing them to a burgeoning array of male beauty
products. These skills and products are presented as "naturally" belonging to gay urban lifestyle
experts whose sexual difference is conveyed by stereotypically feminine attributes, such as
knowledge about beauty products and an interest in fashion. However, domesticity and the care of the
self is also shown to be learnable by heterosexual men who need a boost of encouragement in their
personal and professional lives. In part, this must be done to meet the demands of the postfeminist
middle-class dating market, where women who are now expected to earn their own living as opposed
to depending on male providers may expect partners to look attractive and share in historically
feminized quality of life responsibilities. However, the makeover game is also tied to selfempowerment at work in ways that bring men into the feminized domain of the pursuit of the
marketable self as a "technical achievement."'' Many episodes seek to transform underemployed or
unrealized males into successful purveyors of their occupational futures by helping them to join the
metrosexual market by developing a stylish new look, providing an education in the new male beauty
and grooming products, and providing a crash course in social and cultural skills (manners, etiquette,
"people skills") that have historically been coded as feminine. In an episode that demonstrates how
"to-be-looked-atness" has also come to matter as a strategy of self-advancement for men, Jesan needs
the Fab Five's help to break into the quintessential female dream job: fashion modeling. However, he
is working three menial service jobs, which leaves him little time to pursue his dream, and on top of
that he lives in a room in a boarding house. Jesan's inability to advance in his chosen line of work is
presented as a common problem, and in that sense the episode partially disrupts the characterization

of the individual as a free agent in the new flexible economy. However, Jesan's difficulty "breaking
in" to the highly competitive world of male modeling is easily solved with a crash course in fashion,
culture, and grooming that is customized to his professional goal:
Many of us know what it's like to have a job but not get closer to the job. You know, the dream job
that you believe will make you deliriously happy; the kind of job that you look forward to doing every
day. That describes Jesan's situation perfectly. Lucky for him, he has the Fab Five ... to get his
modeling career off the ground.
As a heterosexual man (his girlfriend is repeatedly mentioned, as is always the case on Queer Eye,
which constantly affirms normative heterosexuality), Jesan must learn skills and techniques
stereotypically associated with femininity as well as homosexuality in order to transform himself into
an entrepreneurialized "object of desire." In addition to learning how to groom and fashion himself to
make the most of his good looks, he must be taught how to primp and preen before the camera, and to
"sell himself' to clients, by a professional modeling agency. He also must learn how to strategically
manage himself in "the business" by acquiring the social and self-promotional skills needed to meet
and impress clients, book gigs, and socialize at "model central," a hangout for models and agents.
Having presented Jesan with guidelines for success not only in the male modeling but in the larger
postindustrial feminized workplace as well, the Fab Five sent him on modeling appointments, where
it will be up to him to use his newly acquired skills to "win over" potential clients.
Like other TV makeover programs, Queer Eye fuses expert diagnoses, video surveillance, and handson examinations with humor and suspense to present guidelines for living within an entertaining
format that bears little resemblance to the slow-paced somberness of bona fide "educational" TV. The
program governs through a process of selfobjectification in that the trainee is forced to step outside
his social and cultural "habitus" to examine himself from the vantage point of the experts, and to
assess his own progress in implementing the advice and techniques they provide. The format also
facilitates a rationality of governing at a distance, in that the experts progressively recede into the
background, relying on remote video technology to "watch over" without being seen as the trainee
works to practice and implement new grooming, cooking, decorating, social, and wardrobe skills on
his own. Both processes are extended to TV viewers at home who, although one step removed from
the TV makeover, are offered additional resources to carry out their own customized version of
selffashioning. The television text is only one component of the expansive Queer Eye project, which
includes a how-to book and a web site where TV viewers can obtain archived fashion, beauty,
decorating, and domestic advice as well as episode summaries, video clips, and complete product
guides. Multimedia and mobility are also constructed as being very important to the converged Queer
Eye experience. Reality TV pioneered the fusion of television programming and portable media
devices such as video iPods, PDAs, cell phones, and computers; as one executive explained,
"entertainment has to be able to find people wherever they are, and in forms that can be easily
customized and digested." This turn toward portable nuggets of content has implications for the selfwork inherent to makeover programming, as it provides opportunities to bring the viewer/user into the
reinvention logic of the makeover game more directly than the viewing experience alone. Queer Eye
viewers are enticed to subscribe to wireless updates as well as podcasts with promotions such as
"Want to make yourself better on the go? Download weekly Hip Tip Podcasts and you're on your way

to a better you. Every week download ten new tips from the Fab 5, transfer them to your MP3 player
and listen to them anywhere you want (within the law that is)."
As Walkerdine argues, the feminization of work has not unraveled gender inequalities, because it is
easier for men to learn to perform an entrepreneurial, stylized version of self-reinvention than it is for
women to legitimately acquire and project attributes such as brilliance and competency, which have
historically been coded as inherently male. When women attempt to "perform" intelligence and
authority, they are more apt to be perceived as pathological than self-entrepreneurial, especially if
they lack class status, notes Walkerdine. Women who do not have access to higher education, family
networks, and social/ cultural capital as entry points to the professional middle class on their own
"merit" are offered another route to personal and professional empowerment by makeover TV. The
debut of The Swart, a serialized makeover program that culminates in a beauty pageant, illustrates the
double bind that working and lower-middle class women face as postindustrial work becomes
feminized and techniques of femininity become valuable skills to be acquired and exploited by men as
well as women. Each week, The Swan aims to completely transform a female "ugly duckling" through
extensive cosmetic surgery procedures as well as dental work and compressed exercise, diet, and
grooming regimens. Unlike other makeover shows, which strive for a "realistic" surgical outcome,
The Swan remakes women who typically lack college degrees as well as professional careers into
the living embodiment of "to-be-looked-at" femininity. The program ups the ante on the TV makeover
game by mobilizing a team of surgeons, dentists, personal trainers, stylists, and life coaches to
transform an ordinary female into the personification of sexualized beauty, as characterized by
hourglass figures, enormous artificial breasts, high cheekbones, plump lips, flowing hair (created
through extensions), gleaming white teeth, and fancy evening gowns. In this sense the program draws
from, and intensifies, a history of the promotion of makeup and costume as potential "class levelers"
among women. While the doctors are reified as magicians of science, the woman must also contribute
to the transformation by following a strict low-calorie diet and exercising constantly under the close
supervision of a professional dietician and fitness trainer. Each episode works on two women
simultaneously; by the end of the episode, they are reevaluated by the professionals, who determine
which one of them will be allowed to compete in The Swan pageant. The woman with the "most
dramatic improvement" goes on to the next round. The other is sent home, armed with her newandimproved femininity, to resolve personal problems and hardships (unemployment, marital trouble,
financial difficulties, poor self-esteem) introduced earlier in the episode, provided, of course, that
she is able to keep up the intensity of The Swan's regime. Because only one woman will ultimately
win the title of most beautiful each season, the makeover game retains its competitive element, despite
its bold claim to make any woman into an object of desire through the combination of surgery,
expertise, and supervised self-work.
Reality dating programs are another place to observe the postindustrial feminization of work, which,
as Walkerdine notes, involves adopting historically feminine personality and social attributes in
addition to "to-be-looked-at-ness." Dating show contestants must work on themselves to win over
others in a strategic game of romance. Work seeps into social life, as the contestants navigate the
sexual marketplace as highly calculating and self-enterprising individuals. Joe Millionaire (2003,
Fox) set the tone when it dressed a blue-collar construction worker in fancy clothes and coached him

in fine wine, grooming, fashion, and the art of conversation so that he was able to "pass" as the son of
a wealthy financier. Each week, "Joe" passively-aggressively eliminates one of a cadre of beautiful
women competing for his attention by awarding a prize of fine jewels to those who are chosen to
progress to the next round. The women, who believe they are competing for a relationship with a
wealthy man, fantasize on camera about the luxurious lifestyle they expected to enjoy as a result. They
also spend much screen time styling themselves and strategizing about their performance in
preparation for the group activities and individual "dates" leading up to the weekly elimination ritual.
This is not surprising, for within the dating game format, women and men who are serious about
winning are expected to work on themselves, evaluate themselves, and reinvent themselves when
called for, as explained by The Reality TV Handbook, a compendium of advice for would-be
contestants:
The most difficult part of dating on a reality show is that you will likely have only one chance to
convince your date that you are exactly who she is looking for. When you have the opportunity to be
alone with a potential love interest, you must stand out from your competitors. If you choose to be
yourself, then you are putting your faith in the hands of fate - if you are meant to be together, you are
meant to be together - and there is little advice that can be offered to keep you in the game. But if you
want to boost your chances, dating advisor Eve Hogan and psychologist Dr. Barry Goldstein
recommend employing the following techniques to convince your date that you're the One: Make eye
contact, create similar interests, attempt to finish your date's sentences, laugh and touch your date, be
appreciative of your date.'
Dating games epitomize what Lasch characterized as a calculated ethic of "self-preservation"
creeping into every dimension of social life. "Beneath the concern for performance lies a deeper
determination to manipulate the feelings of others to your advantage," he wrote of the changing nature
of work. "The search for competitive advantage through emotional manipulation increasingly shapes
not only personal relations but relations at work as well; it is for this reason that sociability can now
function as an extension of work by other means."23 What Lasch, writing in the 1970s, didn't fully
recognize was the changing nature of post-welfare liberal governance, which offers self-enterprise as
a resource to individuals who are increasingly obliged to take care of themselves, look out for their
personal interests, manage difficult situations, and make strategic choices in the name of their own
"freedom" and empowerment. As Walkerdine (paraphrasing Rose) argues, "the imperative to be free
within liberalism and developed within neoliberalism demands that under neoliberalism we live our
life as if it were in furtherance of a biographical project of self-realization." Dating games enact this
strategy of government, which mirrors the management of skilled femininity in its emphasis on
recalibration and self-invention. What we are seeing in dating programs that is new is that men also
have to worry about capacities to be made over, and to win others over, through their looks and
personalities in addition to or instead of traditional markers of male desirability, such as wealth and
professional accomplishment. In addition to Joe Millionaire, the dating genre has produced Average
Joe, in which men who "lack" desirable physical attributes must work hard to win the favor of a
beauty queen. This requires exercise regimens and professional makeovers as well as continual
reflection about personal "strategy" and self-presentation. On Mr. Personality, the male contestants
are forced to wear latex masks that conceal their faces; only the TV viewer can see what they look

like. With looks out of the picture, they have to work more intensely on their personalities and
develop acute "soft skills" (such as being a good listener) that are also part of the "flexible" political
economy.24
The place of gender in the makeover game was made particularly clear by Beauty a,ia the Geek
(WB), a hybrid makeover/dating program. The premise of the program hinges on the double bind
referred to by Walkerdine, in that beautiful young women are paired with brilliant but socially and
physically awkward young men, with the idea that each will help transform the other into better
individuals. The men, who all had college degrees, many from prestigious universities, and who were
pursuing "smart" career tracks ranging from rocket science to mathematics, are to learn such skills as
decorating, grooming, fashion, and the art of personality. They are challenged to break out of their
one-dimensional "geekdom" by making over a bedroom, singing karaoke, and learning about spa
services. The women, who are introduced on camera as cocktail waitresses, models, and service
workers, are thin, buxom, and skilled in techniques of femininity, including makeup, clothes, and
flirtation. They are presented as not only uninterested in academics, but incapable of smartness (jokes
often revolved around the women's mispronunciations and misunderstandings of basic terms and
concepts). To prepare the women for a life beyond beauty and socializing, the geeks attempt to
provide a concentrated tutorial in science, politics, finance, and other "intellectual" matters. While the
men are able to refashion themselves fairly well, the women are much less convincing in their
adoption of "geeky" attributes. No matter how much tutoring they receive, the flexible logic of the
makeover game can not reverse the discourse of femininity from which it draws: Beauty and the Geek
can bring young men into the process of self-invention through restyling and charm instruction, but it
cannot transform women without social, educational, and cultural capital into successful knowledge
workers.
Branding the Self: TV Talent/Job Searches
The televised talent/job search is a form of makeover TV to the extent that experts, teachers, and
judges seek to transform raw human potential into coveted opportunities for self-fulfillment through
the realization and expression of talent. Such programming ranges from the amateur talent search
revitalized by American Idol (Fox) to programs that attempt to discover new talent (usually in the
business, fashion, or performance sectors) by immersing contestants in a grueling training regimen
and/or competitive elimination process (Making the Band, VH1; America's Next Top Model, UPN;
The Cut, CBS; I Want to Be a Hilton, NBC; The Apprentice, NBC; Project Runway, Bravo; American
Inventor, NBC). Both strands are entrepreneurial in many senses, including the way in which unpaid
labor becomes a commodity for exploitation by the culture industries, who profit not only from the TV
shows and related merchandise, but also from the consumer goods and services (CDs, fashion,
advertising campaigns) produced through the shows as incubators of talent. Talent/job searches are
entrepreneurial in another way as well: Within the flexible economy, they work to produce what du
Gay calls the governing rationality of the self-enterprising worker.25 TV governs from a distance
through these ventures by circulating techniques for "self-steering" in the new labor economy, and by
enacting processes of governing the self at work.

According to Sennett, the changing nature of work produces three mighty challenges for contemporary
workers: The first is what he calls the compression of time, which requires the embrace of new
strategies for "managing short-term relationships, and oneself, while migrating from task to task, job
to job, place to place." The second challenge is to remain marketable in an economy that values
potential ability and a capacity to multitask over the ideal of "learning to do one thing really well."
Since the "shelf life of many skills is short," workers must retrain frequently, and they also work to
discover and develop new talents and abilities inside themselves. Finally, the worker must learn to
"let go of the past," says Sennett. In the flexible economy, "work is not a possession, nor does it have
a fixed content." It "becomes a position in a constantly changing network," and while people may
compete for position in the corporation, no "one location is an end to itself' and no one "owns" their
place. As past experience and prior service become less valued, the worker is drawn into a "selfconsuming passion" to keep themselves mobile within the labor force. While this process has
something in common with the "constant search for new things" endorsed by consumer culture, it is
"larger than simply being so ambitious one is never content with what one has." One consequence of
the ongoing corporate reinvention and restructuring that defines the current economy is that "work
identities get used up - they become exhausted," which requires the worker to embrace constant
reinvention as well.26

Illustration 3.2 Would-be models must work on their looks as well as their personalities in the
competition, America's Next Top Model (10 X 10 Entertainment for UPN, 2005)
Sennett does not believe that most people desire to, or are capable of, operating this way. "A self
oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability, willing to abandon past experience - is an
unusual sort of human being," he writes. Reality TV's talent/job searches enact an intense version of
the model of work Sennett describes as a game, and reward people's capacities and desires to meet
the challenges and expectations being placed on them. On I Want to Be a Hilton (2005), a competitive
game hosted by Kathy Hilton, wife of hotel heir Rick Hilton and mother of celebrity socialite Paris

Hilton, contestants whose actual occupations include motor vehicle clerk, telephone salesman,
bartender, construction worker, landscape supply clerk, ranch hand and retail store manager compete
for a $200,000 trust fund and a chance to live in a swanky New York apartment for a year. According
to NBC, they will also get a crash course on the New York City high life as "Hilton educates the
contestants in the do's-and-don'ts of haute couture, etiquette and even how to handle an unforgiving
press." More importantly, they will be exposed to glamorous contacts and insider networking
opportunities, which can be exploited for personal gain. To remain in the game, however, the
contestants must progress in competitive challenges intended to test their potential to "live like a
Hilton," from dog grooming and boat rowing to charity work, holding a press conference, and staging
a fashion show. Exemplifying the flexible economy of Sennett's analysis, I Want to Be a Hilton links
the long-standing rags-to-riches fantasy to "portable human skills, being able to work on several
problems with a shifting cast of characters." The challenges vary from week to week, so that each
training period is compressed, and self-mastery in one pursuit cannot easily be transferred to the next
realm. Moreover, in addition to performing as individuals, the contestants must also demonstrate their
capacity to work with a rotating team of other contestants, which demands "soft skills" such as
listening, cooperation, and an ability to encourage and motivate others. The point of the game is not to
master a particular skill but rather to demonstrate potential (as judged by Hilton) in a wide range of
capacities associated with performing the work of a socialite. While the contestants are expected to
manage themselves, they are overseen from a distance by Hilton, who at end of each episode
(borrowing from the corporate model of management Donald Trump established in The Apprentice)
determines who has "disappointed her" and who will leave the game. Contestants are forced to
reexamine their conduct and behavior through Hilton's eyes in ways that parallel the selfobjectification process that occurs on beauty/style makeovers. Hilton's point, as she often emphasizes,
is not to punish, but to enable what Drucker calls "feedback analysis," or the individual's own
continuously monitoring the consequences of his/her decisions and actions at work so that selfmanagement becomes a reality because the worker is able to "adapt and improve." However, not all
of the contestants proved willing to engage with this sort of self-scrutiny. Several candidates
eventually rejected the enterprising path to mobility offered under Hilton's tutelage, including an
African American single mother who, when eliminated, expressed pride in the fact that she had not
changed or "improved" herself as suggested. As she stated with relief during her exit interview, "I am
still Leticia."
I Want to be a Hilton rearticulates the American Dream of mobility by joining it to the new
requirements of ongoing adaptability, flexibility, innovation, and potential for change. Other talent/job
games do something similar in that they often demand working in teams that change constantly and
performing across numerous (often unrelated) challenges, and require the ability to learn new skills
quickly, change strategies, and recalibrate oneself on short notice. While the material prize (a chance
to apprentice to Donald Trump, a professional modeling contract, entry into the fashion business)
offered by television is one motivator, many programs present work as its own reward in the sense
described by Sennett. This way of thinking about work can be traced to the managerial philosophy of
"excellence" that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s to motivate workers by promising them more
opportunities for self-management. The impetus, as du Gay argues, was to shift the purpose of work
away from material rewards, and toward a promise of self-fulfillment that joined the individual's

selfenterprising capacities to productivity and other corporate goals. McGee shows how a related
discourse of "do what you love, the money will follow" began to permeate job advice guides during
the "downsizing" of the 1990s, which presented the "passion of work" as substitute for material
compensation, security, pension plans, and so on. Career advice books began to argue that "shaping
one's work life ought to be conceived of as an art," which promised individual creativity and agency
as the upside of the flexible economy. At the same time this was happening, an "artistic mentality"
was providing an "ideal vehicle for motivating a demoralized, downsized, and otherwise dissatisfied
labor force," notes McGee. Drawing from Andrew Ross's study of dotcom workers, she argues that
artists provided an "ideal work model" for the postindustrial work force because their passion for
what they do motivates them to tolerate long hours for low (or no) pay and they are used to a
"freelance" mindset of contingency. In essence, the "new model of artists/workers ... creates a
voluntary army of people who will work for fun. ,21
Many TV job/talent searches are tellingly set within the creative cultural industries, another testing
ground for flexible labor. As McRobbie argues in her study of fashion designers, the "talent-led
economy" of self-expressive work demands "capacities for inexhaustible resourcefulness, resilience
and entrepreneurialism" that (as with the art world) set the stage for the future of labor. However,
such capacities still do not guarantee success in a "lottery economy," where opportunities for success
are limited." McRobbie argues that the stock rags-to-riches fantasy has mutated into a less predictable
mediation of success and failure, in which seemingly random factors such as "bad timing" loom large.
For McRobbie, this uncertainty is tolerated because, as with the arts, creative cultural work is
presented as a reward onto itself - a self-fulfilling enterprise. Similarly, while the would-be fashion
designers who appear on Project Runway (Bravo) and The Cut (CBS) seek to advance their careers,
their passion for their chosen line of work is what rationalizes their devotion of boundless (unpaid)
labor to a competitive game with only one prize. The prize awarded by The Cut is a position with
fashion mogul Tommy Hilfiger's clothing company, where the winner will design his or her own
collection under the Hilfiger label. The contestants compete in weekly challenges that range from
making fashion statements out of garbage to ethnic "trendspotting"; at the end of each episode, one
contestant is deemed "out of style" by Hilfiger and sent home. As with other job games, Hilfiger
governs from a distance. Contestants work in teams without direct supervision, but they are also
required to participate in an objectifying evaluation process. Design is only one component of time
compressed challenges that measure entrepreneurialism, teamwork skills, and the capacity for selfexpression within the Hilfiger brand. As Paul Smith has shown, Hilfiger's fashion empire was built on
a flexible model of capitalism in which the "mass customization" and branding of goods is valued
over their production, which is out29 sourced. On Hilfiger's TV program, contestants must
simultaneously tailor their creative labor to fit Hilfiger's market niche, and "brand" themselves as
distinctive commodities worthy of corporate investment. In this sense, the creative talent competition
illustrates McGee's argument that "the primary way individuals seem to imagine achieving any
measure of safety and security" in the new economy is by "identifying with capital - by imagining
themselves as entrepreneurs, as the "CEOs of Me, Inc. ,311 While Hilfiger is dismissive if not cruel
to contestants who fail to demonstrate "potential" to bolster themselves in the service of the Hilfiger
brand, uncontrollable circumstances (including the fact that only one person can win) are shown to
play some role in the competition, and this also differentiates The Cut from conventional upward

mobility myths in the sense theorized by McRobbie. No matter how passionate, adaptable,
industrious, cooperative, talented, and enterprising the contestant, failure is not only a possibility but
a probability in a "lottery" economy. As with work in the real world, there are no guarantees - a fact
that The Cut and other TV job games illustrate more than any other type of reality television.
America's Next Top Model (UPN), a job game in which young women compete for a professional
modeling contract, brings together many of the techniques, strategies, and rationalities examined in
this chapter. On this program, women live together while "enduring a series of tasks in a highlyaccelerated modeling boot camp to see if they have what it takes to make it in the high-profile
industry." Each week, they participate in challenges that have as much to do with the actualization of
personality, perseverance, and self-enterprising skills as they do with beauty. Professional stylists,
designers, agents, and models serve as coaches to the aspiring models, and as judges who continually
evaluate the quality of the products (photograph, video) produced through their labor. The program
was conceptualized by Tyra Banks, who presents her own story of overcoming poverty to achieve
supermodel fame as a template for the women to emulate. Banks, who also has a talk show and a line
of merchandise and has been profiled by Fortune magazine as an up-and-coming media mogul,
attributes her stardom to her entrepreneurialism: "I see women in the mall or on the streets who look
ten times better than I do," she claims, "but can they sell a product?" Likewise, on America's Next
Top Model, the potential to sell products (including oneself) is valued and measured through
challenges that range from improvising a commercial to hanging from wires for a fashion shoot
(which caused a contestant with a fear of heights to break down in tears). The woman are also put in
situations where they must quickly put together a look or persona using brand-name makeup, clothing,
and other props for the camera, in order to demonstrate their ability to tailor their various assets to
meet the shifting demands of spokeswomanship. According to Banks, the contestant "who passes all
the tests" wins the game. Within the context of the flexible economy, America's Next Top Model
demonstrates, through ongoing educational techniques and examinations, that no woman - not even a
fashion model - can rely on "to-be-lookedat-ness" alone, but must constantly invent, cultivate, and
promote multiple assets and talents. As widely noted in the media, Banks "relishes debunking the
glamorous illusions of supermodels to reveal herself as a cellulite-prone, baggy eyed average girl."
She regularly "appears on camera without makeup" to show women what can be accomplished
through a combination of ingenuity, toil, and enterprise. Known for what she calls a "tough love"
philosophy, she often screams at those who disappoint her - not to punish them, but to motivate them
to improve or face elimination.31 Banks encourages the women to envision themselves as "CEOs of
Me" in the sense advocated by managerial gurus, which means seeing oneself as a branded
commodity that requires perpetual reinvention: "Your product just happens to be your physical self
and a little bit of your personality too," she explains. "When they don't want it anymore, don't feel
discarded. Just know that your product is just not hot anymore. Know that you'll have to revamp that
product or go into another field. ,12 If the techniques and attributes of femininity are presented as
strategies for navigating the insecurities of work, America's Next Top Model brings the process full
circle.

Chapter 4

TV and the
Self-Defensive Citizen
In 2004, producers for a prospective program for the Discovery Channel solicited applicants for a
new twist on makeover TV: the "home security makeover show." The program debuted a year later as
It Takes a Thief, an instructional game in which former criminals show just how easy it is to break
into private homes, however secure the owners think they are. According to the program's publicity,
personal security has become a serious and ongoing concern in which there's always "room for
improvement" - or, in the parlance of a "home security makeover," always rooms for improvement.
Each episode demonstrates not only how "vulnerable" the average homeowner is to a break-in, but
"how upsetting life would be without prized possessions." To empower the participant (and, by
extension, the TV viewer at home) to prevent such an occurrence, the program offers a "free" security
upgrade and advice on avoiding future intrusions. Fusing improvement-oriented logic of the makeover
to the "problems" of security and risk, it proclaims, "How Safe is Your House? Not as safe as we can
make it!"
This chapter shows how instrumental TV has become to strategies of assessing and managing risk in
the current stage of liberalism. In previous chapters, we touched on the role of risky behavior in the
"interventions" and makeover programs that promise to turn needy individuals into purveyors of their
own successful outcomes in life. Here, we trace TV's relationship to more specific security issues
and risks, including financial risk, personal safety, and "homeland security." Expanding our focus on
the role of cultural technologies in the "reinvention of government," we show how the increase of
technologies for managing risk and security (including reality TV) has dovetailed with the
privatization of welfare and the promotion of personal responsibility, as well as with heightened
attention to terrorism and national security issues. We show how individuals are enlisted to
understand and manage risks in all of these spheres, by following and implementing advice as well as
by purchasing products. Rather than assuming there is "room for improvement," as TV claims, we
analyze the current reasoning about risk, asking whether the new technologies, experiments, and
solutions have made our lives safer and more secure, or whether their proliferation is symptomatic of
greater insecurities.
Is it fair to claim, as has German social theorist Ulrich Beck, that we are now living in a "risk
society"?' Is contemporary life more full of risks than in the past? If so, how do we verify this claim?
Do we now live in a heightened state of risk because we have lost the traditional forms of social
support (as Beck argues), or because we lack faith in the State to be a provider of social welfare and
security? Or conversely, to what extent has the urgent sense of being "at risk" been manufactured by
the sheer number of programs for risk assessment and management that have emerged? And do the
procedures for verifying risks (i.e., the ubiquity of surveillance cameras and data collection) produce
insecurities which, in turn, require further solutions and refinements of "outdated" procedures? Has
the value and importance of risk management taken on an urgency in the United States since
September 11, 2001? And if so, how?
To understand TV's relationship to changing strategies of security and risk management, it is useful

first to review liberalism's longstanding preoccupation with strategies of both welfare and security.
Foucault is particularly instructive about liberal government's early formation around programs of
security and risk-management, and some of the most noteworthy and compelling elaborations of
Foucaultian accounts of power and government have turned to liberalism's twin preoccupations with
risk and security. Foucault's historical studies of early modern forms of power frequently dwell upon
the emergence of programs and institutions of public health and social medicine.2 Programs of public
health were multifarious, including programs targeting various kinds of conditions, environments
(particularly in cities), and populations considered to be unhealthy and capable of fostering the
spread of unhealthiness. This is a crucial point because it casts "health" as not just a matter of
overcoming physical ailments but as a more heterogeneous sense or "state" of well-being which is
achieved or threatened throughout daily living. This is also a crucial point because it underscores
how programs with a positive uptake (i.e., preventing the spread of disease or helping the unhealthy)
simultaneously operated as programs of social management, regulating environments and populations.
And in this way, programs for managing public health and administering "social medicine" became a
central objective and technique of liberalism as governmental rationality.
Foucault also noted that the "health of the modern state" depends upon the welfare, well-being,
growth, and energy/productivity of its citizens. In this respect, the modern idea of welfare is
intertwined with the care that government exercises over individuals and populations, "looking out
for" and "watching over" citizens by protecting them from unseen risks, as a shepherd watches over a
flock. Liberal government's role in instituting rules and regulations is rationalized as assuring healthy
behavior and controlling unhealthy or risky behavior. Furthermore, the rules and standards for
assessing and managing the healthiness of citizens are the way that health and unhealthiness are
verified - made observable, explicable, and a fact according to modern techniques for measuring and
assessing. The health of the polis (the citizenry and their environment) and of the metropolis
(expansive and densely populated cities) has depended upon the rules, standards, regulative agencies,
curative sciences, and improving technologies (e.g., public sidewalks, sewage systems, street
lighting) for keeping the polis orderly in all those places where bodies interact in potentially
"unhealthy" ways. Pollution, disease, poverty, deviance, and criminality all became separate but
interrelated targets of programs for assessing and managing public health. Putting criminals in prison,
exiling lepers, delivering the insane to asylums, and installing street-light grids had the effect of
linking a healthy life to orderly life and of moving perceived social ills or problems into
environments where abnormalities could be observed and "cured." Developing the technologies for
monitoring or "watching over" the various and changing threats to public health, therefore, has been a
deeply governmental technology, and we discuss below how contemporary TV continues this
practice, even as it has become instrumental for a new rationality about government.
Assuring public health, rationalized as protecting a citizenry from risks, has been central to modern
conceptions of public safety. The modern idea of police and policing (as one role of the State)
developed out of this positive role of government as looking after, safeguarding, and watching over
citizens, and developing techniques for making their behavior rational, orderly, and knowable.
"Policing" may be too strong and narrow a term to describe the various ways that the "health" of
citizens' lives is managed and regulated. But the term is useful not only because it underscores the

semantic tension between policing and policy/diplomacy but also because it emphasizes how welfare
is always a matter of risk assessment and management. In this sense, the administration of public
welfare and well-being has been tantamount to the administration of public safety and security. The
civility - the proper, moral conduct - of modern societies has depended upon these techniques of
guaranteeing public health as a matter of public safety and security. While the modern conception of a
police force has to do with the authority of the State to enforce rules and regulations that prevent,
discourage, and quarantine unhealthy/risky behaviors (malaise, sickness, criminality), liberalism has
sanctioned policing as necessary for the health and welfare of its citizens. Government thus operates
"at a distance" in two senses: administering the rules and regulations for keeping society healthy, and
administering public health and safety through multiple programs and associations throughout society,
which collectively make the security of society and citizens - a "social security" in the broadest sense
- the responsibility of the State as well as the private programs and citizens comprising a civil
society.
How a society's security is achieved brings together the administration of public safety and public
welfare as a "safety net." In this respect, the responsibilities of liberal government have developed in
two (albeit connected) ways: guaranteeing various liberties and rights of citizens (formalized in
constitutions) but also protecting against various risks (the "social obligation" of state-government).
Exercising the political freedoms valued by liberalism (and the economic freedoms valorized under
capitalism) involves calculating and managing risks to maximize protection and minimize exposure. In
the "security society," liberal government constantly develops, legislates, and experiments about how
best to manage the insecurities of citizens (to guard against factors deemed risky and to protect against
exposure), but also how best to maintain its own authority and expertise to manage these insecurities.
For the most part, the current stage of liberalism (a "neoliberalism") involves a deepening and
widening of the arrangement that Foucault has discussed. However, there have been some noteworthy
changes. Building on our arguments about TV's relation to forms of privatization and personalization
of welfare, this chapter considers many forms of privately provided security as social welfare, as
well as the ways in which these programs are being acted upon by state agencies and administrations,
and how a Homeland Security has formed around the considerable networks of securitization. This
line of analysis considers how civil rights and liberties (as well as privacy) are being redefined,
regulated differently than in the past, and even trumped, by both public and privately administered
programs of securitization. While the rights of citizens are formalized in constitutions, the security of
citizens is a matter of social contracts, many of which are now formed informally through private
providers and with oneself. While we will analyze current efforts by the State to protect citizens from
risks (as matters of national or "homeland" security) through public-private "partnerships," much of
our analysis examines the expansive networks of private, personalized, and customizable security
services and technologies now available, and their contributions to the securitization of the social.
As we have seen, the current governmental arrangement for welfare citizenship has occurred through
private, market-oriented outsourcing and citizens' daily reliance upon private providers for social
welfare and security. As Rose has noted about the current stage of liberalism, "the social logics of
welfare bureaucracies and service management have been replaced by a new "configuration of
control agencies - police, social workers, doctors, psychiatrists, mental health professionals - [that]

become connected up with one another in circuits of surveillance and communication designed to
minimize the riskiness of the most risky."' Increasingly this requires citizens to act on their own behalf
by managing their own risks with the private resources available to them. In this sense, "advancing"
liberalism involves not just reinventing government but reinventing citizens' relation to a security
society through new plans, experiments, and demonstrations of risk assessment and management. This
has involved changing the relation of citizens to the resources for assessing and managing risk by
making risk more observable and intelligible, and by training citizens to be the guardians of their own
security throughout daily life. Whereas Foucault's writing about risk management in a security society
helps us understand liberal government's deep, historical tendency to cast the State as "watching
over" the health of its citizens, the current governmental arrangement emphasizes a new rationality
about the State's implication in private and personalized networks of support, resources available to
targeted lifestyle clusters. Furthermore, the new role of these private networks necessitates rethinking
Foucault's argument about the State as watchman over a healthy society; in these tunes (as discussed
below) corporate health, and the health of private "support networks," become a measure of a healthy
State and society.
There are three general ways that the programs for managing the wide variety of contemporary risks
have been integral to "reinventing government," and we outline them briefly using the events
surrounding Hurricane Katrina - events that do not represent the full range of contemporary risks but
that help clarify what has changed and help introduce the following sections about TV. First, risk
management has been part of a federalism that favors "empowering" regional and local government to
act as "first responders" to current risks, with the federal government cast in a "supporting" role. The
lack of timely response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is an infamous example of this
current reasoning about the role of federal and local government in managing intersecting risks.
Thousands of volunteer "first-responders" (doctors, firefighters, and police) from various municipal
and state agencies around the United States made themselves available, even though many were turned
back by federal authorities in Louisiana. The lack of coordination and the failures between federal
and local responses (particularly regarding the proper role of the Federal Emergency Management
Agency) became a catalyst for further risk assessment and refining security techniques of national and
local administrative agencies, though still within the federalist model of security planning and
response.
Second, programs for managing and assessing risks have been part of "public-private partnerships,"
with the federal government again in a "supporting" posture. The response to Katrina elevated
nonprofit agencies, such as the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity, to the first line of a civil defense,
even as the Red Cross's blatant cost-overrun and widely reported inefficiencies demonstrated its
precariousness as a primary provider of civil defense. As explained below, mobilizing and acting
upon private programs of risk assessment and management is fundamental to the Bush administration's
"compassionate conservatism" and Homeland Security that link public welfare and public safety, and
the secular and religious roles in "saving" people. However, experiments such as "compassionate
conservatism" and "Homeland Security" could not be possible without a relatively robust (and
relatively recent) network of private programs designed to assess and manage risk. The "cleanup"
after Hurricane Katrina mobilized various branches of these private networks of risk management

which already have become part of what counts as a "support service" in the lives of different
populations in the United States. This network includes private agencies assessing risk to personal
property and finances - insurance experts and claims adjustors (working in communication with
building and health inspectors), a real-estate industry, and credit providers, debt counselors, and
financial advisors. This network of personal property and financial risk management operates (often
on the same populations) with networks of managers of personal health - the nexus of doctors,
psychiatrists, mental health professionals, and social workers discussed by Rose.
Third, the reinvention of government assumes, encourages, and increasingly requires that citizens
assess and manage their own risks. This occurs in conjunction with the increasingly expansive array
of private-public programs in the first and second networks described above, and it certainly
involves TV. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 5, the paramedical expertise of Dr. Phil McGraw and
the "team efforts" of the crew of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition both became televisual solutions
to healing select families/households. They provided a model for how, privately and individually, to
restore a public's health, to manage a newly risky population that lacked personal possessions, and to
provide a plan for securing their lives in a region that may yet be affected by future hurricanes. These
TV demonstrations and interventions not only operated in "partnerships" with nonprofit agencies
(many listed on the web sites for these TV programs) and with counseling networks (like those Rose
mentions), but also in consort with the Bush administration's proposal for Enterprise Zones, wherein
homeowners (rather than those who never owned homes) are supposed to build their way back to a
healthy and stable life - albeit still within the shadow of a fragile levee system. Katrina thus became
not just a TV program, but a laboratory for testing and demonstrating the latest experiments in risk
assessment and management as "life interventions." There were the "live" demonstrations of private
citizens being prevented from assisting flood victims because federal and local "first-responders"
considered their rescue actions to be unsafe (!), and then there were the life interventions of the TV
experts, who arrived after the flood, with a plan and a program to manage future risks and to secure
financial futures. The following sections consider TV's instrumentality within these three fronts of the
current govern- mentalization of safety and security and within other kinds of risks.
Managing Financial Risk as "Self-Accounting"
Reality TV has emerged around several crises in the global and US financial markets. The first was
the sharp downturn of the US stock market in 1999 after several years of intense investment, much of
which was directed to the "dotcom" enterprises and startup ventures (businesses developing computer
hardware, software, and services, and a variety of "smart" technologies). As Mark Andrejevic has
pointed out, reality TV exploited an emerging link between TV and the Web, coopting and
repurposing successful online entrepreneurs such as "Jenny-cam" and "Dot.com Guy," which made
money by providing direct and paid access to the live web sites.' According to Randy Martin, in the
late-1990s investing also became personalized, faster, and more common among the investor class
through computer software and online brokerage resources that fueled a syndrome popularly referred
to as "day-trading."6 The sharp downturn of the stock market was a televised saga, not only on news
programs, but specifically on several TV networks that had emerged during this period to provide
round-the-clock "investor-news."

The second crisis, the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City, was a more dramatic
TV event. The Trade Center had become a financial hub in a global economy, replacing the Empire
State Building as the vertical icon of New York and as the skyscraper that King Kong scaled in the
remake of the eponymous film. The attack on the Trade Center sparked a chain of fear in the United
States that profoundly affected the confidence of investors and consumers. To rally US citizens in the
days following the attack, President Bush urged citizens to return to shopping centers (presumably to
shop) and to take vacations at resorts such as Disney World. As a TV event, the attack on the Trade
Center was replayed over and over, demonstrating a "present danger" and "new" threats to national
security that partly involved financial insecurities.
The third crisis was another TV event: the much publicized collapse of the energy-trading company,
Enron, a few months after September 11, 2001. Enron was a company that benefited enormously from
action by the administration of George W. Bush in the early 1990s to deregulate local public utilities.
It was one of the most recognized philanthropic resources in Houston, Texas (the site of Enron's
corporate headquarters), and was heralded (even outside Houston) as a new model of corporate and
employee management, listed as one of top Fortune-500 corporations in the United States for over
five successive years, and one of the most recognized and active contributors to the election of
George W. Bush (and, according to Bush, a successful model of corporate government and corporate
citizenship). And for a few weeks in late 2001, Enron had the dubious epitaph of being "the largest
bankruptcy in history ... and in the world." For a company that in 2000 had about 21,000 employees,
reported assets of over $100 billion, and a stock value of $90 a share, the Enron bankruptcy totaled
roughly $25 billion, reduced its stock value to about 30c a share, and wiped out most of the personal
retirement funds of employees whose financial future had been pegged to stock options in the
company. The company's collapse was hastened by a series of revelations in 2001 about its elaborate
shell-games and financing schemes involving primarily its management of energy and broadband
distribution and a network of subsidiaries. Following in the immediate aftermath of the first two
crises, Enron became the most vivid demonstration of the problems in oversight accompanying the
new regime of deregulated public utilities (as public services); Enron's collapse exposed lack of
oversight in accounting, trading, finance, and investment. And Enron demonstrated the problems of the
neoliberal models and rationality/ responsibility of corporate governance that privately controlled the
social security of its employees, as corporate welfare-citizens. In the end, the company became a
failed experiment in risking the financial futures of employees, of Houston's citizens who were not
employed by the company, and of millions of citizens in the United States whose pension managers
had invested in shares of Enron. Moreover, in early 2002 the bankruptcies of WorldCom (the second
largest telecommunications company) and Global Crossing (also a telecommunications company)
relegated Enron's bankruptcy to being the "second largest bankruptcy in history." Though bigger than
Enron's, these latter two bankruptcies attracted relatively less media attention.' Bankruptcy seemed to
matter less as TV spectacle than as the "new normal" - the weekly reality - of TV.
Cumulatively, these events (in part as media events) contributed to a state of panic and unease, which
vividly demonstrated the ripple effect of financial risks and linked financial risks to other kinds of
risk - to an environment of risks and risk-taking. However, while the bankruptcies may have
heightened public unease about being exposed to financial risk, and public uncertainty about the

trustworthiness of the experts and authorities who "watch over" the new arrangements of public
utilities, public accountancy, and the pensions of citizens whose financial futures are tied to corporate
health and risk-taking, TV and other media have continued to prepare and empower citizens about
how to live with risk - how to seek out reliable resources and how to better their chances of
weathering or surviving in the current climate of risk-taking. In this sense, the events became public
examples of the new state of heightened financial risk as well as the need to develop ever more
effective and reliable resources for calculating and managing risk privately and by individuals. This
environment required not only more but more customizable programs for maximizing protection and
minimizing exposure, and made the assessment and management of financial risk profoundly part of
daily life - a regular and self-regulating activity in one's life. While there are books, magazines, and
web sites that offer customizable resources for an individual's management of personal finance and
risk-taking in this environment, the seriality of TV programs has proven to be particularly well suited
for regularizing financial self-management - for integrating financial management into one's daily life.
An individual seeking aids in financial security and monetary risk-taking may have the "freedom" and
the "independent" disposition to seek out reliable resources, but TV is a medium that is best suited to
helping consumers help themselves by regularizing regimens of financial self-actualization through
serialization.
As Kandy Martin has argued, the realm of personal finance offers one way of thinking about the
current expectation (in and around TV programs) to put one's life in order, to effectively manage
oneself and one's family and household, to take an active role in tending to one's financial future and
security. Personal finance (i.e., checkbookbalancing and other record-keeping) is a fundamental
feature of the well-run, well-governed household. Describing what he calls "the financialization of
daily life," Martin argues that making finance a part of personal routines makes it integral to an array
of programs for selfactualization. In that sense, personal finance as the model, necessity, and reward
of putting one's house in order bleeds into the various ways that one lives one's life as an ethic
involving personal choices, risks, and responsibilities. And if we see finance as central to personal
and domestic activities, we also need to recognize that the private/personal world is no less
monetarily set or fixed than the outside world.' Even though we cannot always predict how certain
investments will pay off, just as we cannot predict with certainty the direction of markets and
economic trends in the world out there, we increasingly have been provided with ways of ordering
our financial lives and our financial selves. While we may not be able to predict financial outcomes
with certainty, we can (and are encouraged) to have fun with the games of finance and to take control
at least over how we "invest ourselves."
The financialization of daily life has involved various kinds of services and programs (and even
games) over the late 1990s. Particularly significant has been the emergence of day-trading as a
practice whereby individual investors could (more or less) bypass the traditional financial investment
services in order to act as his/her own broker.' It is no small coincidence that this trend occurred as a
particular professional class and lifestyle cluster began to exploit online services and computer
software to manage their own financial accounts as well as their personal financial investments. By
the very late 1990s and early part of the 2000s, the risks of day-trading had been matched by the rapid
growth of web-based services of personal finance and investment that made TV matter in slightly new

ways. TV also became an extension of the contemporaneous proliferation of "do-it-yourself'

guidebooks about managing personal bankruptcy, investment, taxes, insurance, retirement, and finance
(e.g., Personal Finance for Dummies, currently in its fourth edition). Companies such as Ameritrade,
which developed on-line divisions for "self-directed accounts," and E-Trade.Com, which had grown
over the 1990s primarily as a web resource for personal investors, contributed to forging the link
between TV and online trading by advertising frequently on TV programs and channels, particularly
the growing number of financial programs discussed in this section. Ameritrade Plus promoted the
"Power of Choice" as a reference to the freedoms of self-directed accounting, and in a TV advertising
campaign with Sam Waterston during 2006 the company put forth a political-financial Declaration of
Investor Independence: "Independence is the spirit that drives America's most successful investors."
A 2005 TV ad-campaign for E-Trader software and services represented the exuberance of a man's
successfully making trades from his personal computer at home, with the slogan, "Become Master of
Your Domain," as the ad's narrator reminded TV viewers about its professional support network
accompanying its software. These TV ads for web products and services collectively linked the
"empowerment" of self-directed, interactive media (e.g., Ameritrade Plus web site's "Risk Quiz" for
"evaluating your risks") with the routinization and discipline found through TV's serialized financial
programs.
The trend toward personal investment-service companies that have forged a link between web- and
TV-based resources became a basis for launching two 24-hour financial TV channels, the Bloomberg
Network and CNBC. Both are, after CNN, global TV networks devoted entirely to investment news
and tools."' The Bloomberg Network's title refers not only to its global TV, radio, and podcasting
network but also to an array of investment services and products. CNBC emerged over the 1990s
alongside NBC's other cable-news network, MSNBC, a joint venture with Microsoft (since
divorced), and NBC's effort to capitalize upon the connection between the web and TV." While both
networks' programming schedules are vivid examples of TV's emerging place within the
financialization of daily life, CNBC (more than the Bloomberg TV network) exploits TV's capacity to
fit into the routines of daily life. Its daily offerings have included a morning show ("Morning Call"), a
midday show ("Power Lunch"), and a close-of-the market program ("The Closing Bell"). If traditional
TV was organized around the daily lives of households, these two networks signal two changes to the
rationality of programming/scheduling for "financial TV": that there is always money to be made in a
world which is eternally risky (24 hours a day) and that the daily life for a personal investor-class of
viewers is organized around the major global trading venues such as Wall Street. That both networks
continually run banners with trading information and stockmarket fluctuations across the bottom of the
screen (and often devote one vertical side of the screen to more information) makes these channels'
"live-ness" an effect of the rationality of financial management and of the part that live financial TV
plays in the organization of the daily lives of personal investment managers. As Martin has noted,
risk-taking is about living "in the moment,"12 and TV's finance channels make risk-taking and risk
management an ongoing game with ever new strategies that private investors can use to participate
throughout their day, or the channels simply provide background (investment muzak) to create the
proper mood for playing the game.
As technologies of the financialization of daily life, these two TV networks separate (or rather,

honor) finance as a distinct discipline/ game, even as the networks represent other activities through
the lens of finance. It is not just that these networks (as TV networks, multimedia networks, and
networks of resources) help introduce into daily life, and for private investors, a rationality about risk
analysis endemic to corporate management, with corporate managers and professional investors
providing the expertise on the networks' talk shows, and with "financial news programs" providing
the lens for understanding any event in the world, as in business magazines and newspapers. As
technologies of the financialization of daily life, they bring the rationalities of corporate management
to all sectors of government, especially private life, family, and household. As we saw in previous
chapters, the link between education and game is crucial to the current stage of TV - to TV's
reinvention as a technology of government and citizenship. And the development and success of these
two networks are one dimension of this linkage, making investing and risk-taking about fun and
entertainment as well as about education and discipline.
The educational thrust of finance-TV is decidedly a commercial enterprise, but it also is about
shaping a productive, energized, risktaking citizen through a particular kind of citizenship training one that provides the rules, strategies, and technologies of self-investment and self-accounting, as a
path to self-actualization through "financial independence." Acquiring sound financial education and
becoming plugged into networks of financial advice and motivational training are crucial for a
political and governmental rationality that has emphasized breaking "pernicious" cycles of
dependence on state forms of welfare. The link between online and televisual self-investment and
selfaccounting thus has recently involved the formation of "universities" for active, "independent"
investors. Like other kinds of online universities (which, as of 2005, could receive federal grant and
tuition support), and after the model of "adult" or "continuing education," these "universities for
private investors" usually are extensions of the network of a particular financial advice service,
where advice and training services straddle multiple media, including TV. Ameritrade, the
Bloomberg Network, and Donald Trump all have launched their own online "universities." These
universities consist of "lessons" or "classes" that are self-directed and that resemble both a menu of
advice-hyperlinks and "twelve-step" programs common in self-help training. Trump University
developed alongside Trump's TV series, The Apprentice, his series of books offering financial and
investment advice, and his appearance on QVC (the shopping channel), where he articulated the
educational potential of the book series to that of the TV series. And, as discussed in Chapter 5, The
Apprentice was used during 2005 in seminars at some of the most prestigious business schools in the
United States.
Because the finance-TV channels, as part of networks of personal financial services, cater to an
investor class and lifestyle cluster that is predominantly male and affluent, their models of citizenship
and their techniques of economic citizenship training cast their clients as being "at risk" in slightly
different ways than other programs that cater to a class who is economically at risk. This is a
complicated distinction, however, since both classes and lifestyle clusters require resources for being
active and productive citizens within the current governmental rationality that values self-reliance and
enterprise. In this latter sense, risk in the current security society is not restricted only to a class that
cannot quite manage its own finances. The breadth of exposure covers more of the population, even
though different classes and lifestyle clusters require somewhat different resources and TV.

One of the most noteworthy finance-TV programs that bridges this divide is Suze Orman's. Orman is a
dynamic, energized financial advisor who stresses the importance of "financial education" as key to
"turning one's life around" - or, as she puts it, to "changing the course of one's financial destiny."
Beside being a prolific author (including Nine Steps to Financial Freedom) and active on the lecture
circuit, Orman has had two TV programs - one on CNBC (The Suze Orman Show) and one on QVC
(The Financial Freedom Hour). Orman's programs are geared particularly to female investors,
representing a convergence of neoliberal and third-wave feminist valorization of women's financial
independence and self-reliance. However, her CNBC program is primarily a call-in program, similar
to radio call-in helplines, that attempts to solve the financial problems of men and women. (She
commonly refers to female callers as "sisters.") While there has been "paid programming" by authors
and professional investors in nonprimetime TV since the 1980s, Orman represents a new legitimacy
of expertise because of her programs' articulation of "self-worth to networth" and of financial selfhelp to "life interventions" as social work. As part of the schedule of programs at CNBC, Orman's
program for financial self-recovery involves learning how to invest wisely but also how to manage
daily financial responsibilities, frequently by a class that has difficulty making ends meet. As in radio
call-in programs offering financial advice, Orman's CNBC program recommends how to design a
very personal regimen of financial self-accounting, helping those who have the desire and capacity to
help themselves, and apologetically but firmly explaining to some subjects that they are beyond help.
Even in these examples of citizens who are at risk, her message often laments the lack of financial
education in public schools, as part of a standard curriculum to prepare citizens for the rest of their
financial lives in the United States.

Illustration 4.1 Personal finance guru Suze Orman teaches women to "empower" themselves through
money management (CNBC TV for CNBC, 2006)
The rationality that Martin attributes to becoming a good citizen through self-accounting and selfinvestment certainly applies to Orman's televised advice and lessons to aspiring entrepreneurs or

those at risk. However, finance-TV also negotiates the relation between education/rationality and the
fun/pleasure of risk-taking. TV's instrumentality as citizenship training depends as much upon viewers
learning the responsibilities of self-investment as upon enjoying what is fun - even sexy - about selfaccounting and the world of personal finance. In early 2006, an episode of Wife Swap (a program
wherein wives with apparently incommensurate values trade families) swapped a mother/wife who
was fanatical about managing household finances with a mother who was unable to control her
shopping impulses, not only for herself but for her only child. (The first season of HBO's Big Love in
2006 also played upon this stereotypic binarism, that women either are unable to quell their urge to
spend and shop or are fanatical shrews when they do attempt to balance the family ledger.) In the
thrifty household, the entire family is held to a strict regimen that values saving, with two daughters
having to save their allowance in order to help pay for the family's annual vacations. The other
household is represented as less restrictive and rational about savings and expenditures, but also as
continually stressed by the challenges of billpaying. As in other episodes of Wife Swap, this one
seeks to claw back the two paradigms of feminine self-investment into a model of a healthy balance
between rules and pleasure.
Similarly, The Apprentice is both a game and a series of lessons through which the rules of
entrepreneurialism are learned and rehearsed. In that some reality TV programs such as Wife Swap
are games with oneself (journeys to greater self-accountancy in the episode discussed above), The
Apprentice is a vivid example of how the game with oneself is turned into a game about the risks of
being an entrepreneur and/or corporate manager on an intensely stressful, but fun, competitive playing
field. As a game of training good, reliable, and effective corporate citizens to recognize risk and to
weed out risky players/ partners in games of management, The Apprentice also is a televisual
experiment/ demonstration in solving the problems associated with Enron - with Trump being the
successful paradigm of wise self-investment, a counterpoint to Enron's former chairmen who were
unable to reinvent themselves for any reality TV series except the collapse of Enron.
US TV has a long history of game programming, with some of the earliest TV game shows having
continued already successful radio game shows. And while TV gaming has always and obviously
been about risk-taking, the design and technology of gaming meets certain requirements of a new
governmental rationality. This is not simply a matter of perpetuating a capitalist ideology of risktaking subjects but of TV's reinvention to make gaming an extension of networks and "programs" that
are explicitly about preparing players to ride the waves of increasingly intense financial risk and
responsibility in their daily lives. Recent primetime TV series such as Deal or No Deal may
reformulate earlier TV game shows (with new hosts, flashier sets, and seemingly larger monetary
prizes), but the rules and mattering of the game pertain to a different arrangement between TV and the
resources of selfinvestment. So, NBC scheduled Deal or No Deal in early 2006 as its lead-in to
weekly broadcasts of The Apprentice, with Trump as a "surprise" guest-cum-financial advisor to a
contestant laboring over whether to take a risk in the premiere episode. If Who Wants to be a
Millionaire?, one of the early ventures in the current reality TV syndrome, allowed contestants to
make one phone call to help them answer a question, Deal or No Deal allowed a free call to seek free
advice from a financial expert whose authority is serialized through books and TV programs.
Furthermore, if TV (arguably more than other current media) has the capacity to demonstrate how

finance can be fun (i.e., a game with rules and strategies), then it is worthwhile recognizing that
CNBC reruns broadcasts of The Apprentice and has cast the hyperkinetic Jim Cramer (a successful
stock investor in the late 1990s) as host of Mad Money, a financial advice program in which Cramer
wears costumes to convey the fun of learning about finance.
The impetus to design and refine demonstrations, experiments, and games of risk-taking also helps
explain the trend in TV poker during the first decade of the twenty-first century. TV poker has been
programmed across multiple channels - from sports channels to Bravo to CNBC, whose packaging of
poker is entitled Heads-up Poker and has become part of that network's menu of "investment tools."
TV poker may be the most minimalist, least contrived game of risk-taking on TV, as well as the purest
way that current TV represents the democracy of becoming an expert in games of speculation and
minimizing exposure. (Most TV poker programs emphasize that anyone can play.) However, that TV
poker, unlike forms of online poker and videogaming, is made part of TV's serialized style of
programming, and linked (as programmatic) to/through various TV channels, each designed for
particular lifestyle clusters, makes TV poker slightly different from earlier TV game shows or online
gaming.
These examples collectively have made TV an extension of programs for financial self-help - for the
self-accounting citizen - even as the forms and technologies of citizenship-formation vary slightly
across the lifestyle clusters comprising contemporary TV. In this respect, an invested (selfactualizing) self is integral to a form of citizenship that is valued and required by the current
governmental arrangement. As Martin rightly notes, "financialization is ubiquitous, but never automatic,"13 and we would add that the same could be said about economic citizenship today. TV
continues to play an important role in aiding citizens who are expected and required to maximize their
capacity to become self-accounting (and in that way, accountable) citizens. TV, as financial planner
and advisor, offers programs of financial empowerment - not in their promise of instant wealth
through winning a competition but in lessons learned along the way. Risk-taking always requires that
one hone one's strategies. However, finance-TV also operates as support system for those "at risk" and this includes a professional middle class as well as those populations exposed to mountains of
credit-card debt. All are exposed increasingly in a governmental rationality that requires citizens (in
an ownership society) to "own up" to their financial futures, though not equally or through the same
technologies. Financialization acts upon TV's programs and capacity for regularizing (making part of
daily life) a regime of selfactualization, and in that sense TV allows citizen-subjects to act "by
themselves" through support networks of planners, advisors, games.
A paradox of this arrangement is that as citizens find themselves less as citizen-recipients and more
as self-actualizing citizen-consumers, they are expected to make more choices. In turn, the choices
valorized by government likely results in a preoccupation with uncertainty and risk. Which resource
should one choose? From which company? These are questions that make the reinvention of
government a formula for embedding risk-taking further in daily life.
Care of the Self as Spying on Oneself

We considered financial risk first because it is a kind of risk often associated with "welfare."
However, as Martin argues, "financialization ... insinuates an orientation toward accounting and risk
management into all domains of life."14 We would add that managing financial risk is one (but not the
only) objective of "life strategies," of TV's programs of self-actualization, and those programs'
implication in a regime of safety and security. Furthermore, neither the rationalities of selfmanagement and self-empowerment, nor the security society and the provision of welfare within it,
are reducible to matters of financial risk and exposure. This is a lesson of Foucault. Rationalities (the
ordering of life and knowledge) do not derive only or principally from economic logic; finance is one
of many ordering activities and knowl- edges.'s Governmentalities form around and seek to contain
various and changing kinds of risky behaviors, environments, and populations. Welfare involves many
kinds of social securities. In this section, we consider the variety of programs through which recent
TV, as governmentality, calculates and seeks to manage various kinds of risks and achieve various
kinds of security.
The proliferation of programs, on and beyond TV, that offer guidance and personalized
techniques/solutions for managing various kinds of personal risks suggests, among other things, that
we have a lot to be prepared about these days and that security is something that we achieve and
practice throughout our daily lives. Given TV's capacity to technologize the everyday through
programs and regimens, TV is in part about endless, daily preparation and readiness - about watching
ourselves through TV. More precisely, we become aware of various kinds of risk through TV, and we
watch ourselves through various kinds of televisual preparation for evaluating and managing various
kinds of risks. The current security society has made TV matter in this way - linking the injunction to
provide for one's own welfare (to "watch over oneself") with the injunction to "watch ourselves" by
conducting ourselves properly, not only by recognizing and avoiding risky behaviors but, in so doing,
seeing to our personal safety and security.
To the extent that one prominent vein of reality TV involves gaming, tests, and contests, risk-taking is
spread out over various genres and programming rationales. Aside from performing risk in TV's tests
(with others or with oneself), there has been a resurgence of crime drama since the late 1990s that
showcases the most modern (if not preternatural) technology for surveillance and forensics. These
programs are not only one of the most successful forms of TV fiction at a time when reality TV has
become the new and increasingly dominant paradigm of US TV, but the new generation of TV crime
drama, despite its rather residual production values, shares reality TV's preoccupation with
surveillance technology as integral to a new regime of security. The "special investigation" units of
the various primetime CSI series regularly showcase surveillance and other investigative
technologies using "artificial intelligence" to recognize criminality that otherwise would elude human
sensory perception. The emergence of "profilers" as protagonists in recent TV crime drama not only
parallels the widespread adoption of this practice in real-life criminal surveillance, which relies
upon behavioral and demographic matrices for sorting among vast possibilities and for verifying true
identities, the practice also coincides with the games of profiling in reality TV (e.g., American Idol or
The Apprentice), where candidates representing the most promise (and the least risk) are vetted from
thousands of applicants based on technical and/or aesthetic standards. The figure of the forensic
psychologist in TV crime drama also extends the authority and rationalities of the "real-life" helpers,

guides, interveners, and clinicians in TV designed as welfare and social. The reliance upon
computer-based ("smart") technology for gathering forensic evidence and for conducting biometric
and behavioral classification is so integral to narratives about control "at a distance" that many
investigators in this recent generation of crime drama are cast as psychics, with extraordinary powers
for seeing and knowing facts, as in ABC's Alias and other outgrowths of X-Files' paranormal
detective fiction.
Our interest in nonfiction TV, however, emphasizes not simply that TV represents "real-life" security
programs, or that it makes these programs ideologically acceptable, but that TV operates as a
technological resource for measuring one's risk and for achieving certain forms of security. The care
of the self through TV increasingly involves spying on oneself, and spying on oneself is productive of
a certain regime of safety and security in the current security society.
Andrejevic is right to note that the hardware and software of surveillance technology has become
integral to the mode of producing and consuming reality TV.'6 He discusses how the plays of
voyeurism and exhibitionism are materially part of a process whereby consumers' interactivity with
reality TV formats leads them, or requires them, to use web sites and telecommunicative devices
which programmers in turn use to gather information and data about their customers through "cookies"
and other tracking software now regularly deployed by commercial web designers. Through their
interactivity with TV's web sites, consumers thus become productive of information about themselves.
As Andrejevic puts it, they go to work for TV programmers in their leisure time, perpetuating an
"economy of surveillance."
Andrejevic's conception of contemporary TV as integral to an ecotiorny of surveillance and
interactivity (an economy of "mass customization") does not go far enough, however, in considering
how TV's various programs of self-surveillance are being adopted as part of governmental rationality
that also expects or requires citizens to watch after and over themselves. How, in this sense, are
economies of surveillance not just about making money, or about making consumers productive of
information that creates monetary value; how are these economies also about making citizens whose
application of selfmonitoring programs are productive of a new regime of safety, a new arrangement
for assessing and managing various kinds of risk, for being ready, within the current security society?
While there are indeed commercial dimensions to TV's game culture, current TV programs also have
become preoccupied with providing "security systems" and preparing citizens to use them. Learning
the techniques of safety and security in part involves learning how to avoid risky behaviors.
Consequently many of the TV programs discussed in previous chapters involve learning about the
risks of living one's life as one has been doing (overweight; with a badly chosen fashion statement,
unruly children, lack of a proper motor vehicle, limited job prospects, etc.), without the proper
resources or training for pulling oneself up by the bootstraps provided by TV.
As discussed in Chapter 3, the process of watching oneself, or secretly watching oneself through the
eyes of others, is a common technique in these programs' design as learning regimens. In programs
about dating and other forms of social interaction and relationship, subjects frequently watch
themselves on camera or watch the actions of others' reactions to the subject's actions - a play of

watching and reflection that is supposed to help the subjects gauge risks, slightly at a distance from
the live action. These games and laboratories of controlled risk-taking and self-monitoring also
include the TV viewer, making the programs' learning and preparation sessions at different degrees of
distance.
A program that blends the surveillance game and experiment with forms of life intervention (and
whose title most pithily sums up TV's current design of self-monitoring and self-accounting) is the
A&E Network's Spying on Myself . In this series, subjects "go undercover," disguised by
professional makeup technicians and by former "CIA operatives" and monitored by hidden
surveillance cameras, in order to surreptitiously learn the truth about their relationship with a friend,
employee, or family member. Episodes in 2006 included a young man's encounter with his estranged
father, a writer trying to understand why his future mother-in-law does not like him, and a
businessman seeking answers to why an employee quit. As personal detectives performing a life
intervention on themselves, the disguised subjects act out games/ experiments of insecurities about
personal relationships (observed "undercover," slightly at a distance). As such, the program casts the
practices of self-surveillance as integral to overcoming insecurities.
The syndicated series Cheaters documents the clandestine love affairs and infidelities of its subjects,
also through hidden cameras and disguises. The program's web site states that the program is
"dedicated to the faithful and presented to the false-hearted to encourage the renewal of temperance
and virtue." Advertising during the broadcasts and on the program's website promotes a panoply of
surveillance technology and services designed for keeping tabs on one's spouse or lover (e.g., the "PC
Detective" for "recording what your lover does online"). Cheaters results as often in allowing
subjects to watch out for themselves as in leading subjects to confirm their suspicions and fears about
the secretive worlds of friends and family."
It also is worth recognizing that risk-taking has become a rewarded dimension of performing various
tasks on TV. Aside from games of extraordinary risk-taking, such as Fear Factor, that emphasize a
squeamishness about risk, there is a prominent vein of reality TV that demonstrates the pleasures of
physical risk-taking. MTV's Jackass and Viva la Bam both are proto-documentaries of slightly
absurdist experiments in risk-taking, almost exclusively by young men. (One wonders whether the
program considers women to be incapable of achieving "jackass-ness," though Oxygen's Bad Girls
Club has been a recent formulation of how that identity might apply to young women, or how young
women negotiate "acting up.") The riskiness of the performances in jackass results in part from
whether the performers will get caught in public places, as when a young man disrobes and then
dances to the music in a stereo store before the manager removes him or the police arrive. As
exhibitions of risky behavior and rule-breaking, these series are as much about the pleasures and
little, personal rewards of risking oneself in the current security society and of risking failure as they
are about why anyone watching the program should not follow their lead (or be concerned about
governing "the jackass" within). The beginning of each broadcast ofJackass thus begins with a
warning that viewers should not attempt any of the experiments in the program.
Factoring fears and insecurities may be most directly at stake in the vein of reality TV oriented
toward testing, under controlled conditions, individuals' capacity to endure and manage extraordinary

stress. However, many of contemporary TV's games and experiments in risktaking emphasize the
ordinariness and banality of safety and security. (Arguably, TV that stages spectacular risk-taking withstanding repeated electric shocks or eating large insects - ratchets up the threshold of what counts
as ordinary and banal risks, but even series such as Jackass document the little pleasures in inventing
and taking risk amid the everyday urban and suburban landscape.) Collectively, these programs
advocate and provide practical advice about preparedness for various kinds of unsafe occurrences.
TV channels oriented toward women regularly include "publicservice" guides for women's
management of various safety concerns in women's lives. One of the most vivid examples of this vein
of women's TV is Lifetime's What Should You Do?, a safety program whose motto is "Be smart, be
ready, and be safe." What Should You Do? provides enactments of women facing everyday risks,
laced with tips from safety experts. These life-risk lessons include managing household risks (e.g.,
detecting carbon monoxide), avoiding risky public encounters (facing armed robbers, fending off
carjackers, preventing gas-station fires, and escaping safely), being a helper (learning how to
administer CPR or to deliver a baby), and (last but not least) "not getting lost in the wilderness." The
path to women's empowerment through a TV channel designed for women's needs thus entails
practical instruction about helping women protect themselves and others. A contradiction of
formulating women's empowerment in this way, particularly with respect to the exhibitions of
pleasurable risk-taking by men in programs such as Jackass, is that empowerment results from
managing risk and demonstrating sobriety, responsibility, and "good citizenship," rather than the thrill
of risk-taking.
One of the most regularized programs of daily safety is the Weather Channel. While this channel
began during the 1980s as 24-hour studio-reporting and on-location reporting (primarily of US
weather events), during the 1990s its programming became more diversified. By the current decade, it
began offering personalized "weather alerts" for subscribers of their online or text-message service.
Its primetime schedule has showcased Storm Stories, a series reenacting weather events and disasters
around the United States. This program has been both story and scientific demonstration of risktaking, of the role of local responders to the needs of citizens, of the resourcefulness of citizens
having to act "on their own" in "natural disasters," and of what not to do - each broadcast ending with
one of the channel's weathermen explaining how these calamities could occur anywhere and at any
time, and thus require constant, daily vigilance and preparedness. There is now no purer example of
TV as daily program/regimen for being alert to the possibility of emergencies and local, personal
disaster - or rather, of how weather affects one's lifestyle as endless, daily planning. Both the TV
channel and its web site offer advice on health, travel, recreation, home and garden, and planning for
"special events." Each topic involves taking various precautions; the channel's provision of health
advice concerns allergies, skin protection, air quality, aches and pains, mosquito activity, colds and
flu, and general "fitness" concerns (e.g., whether it is safe to take one's morning run). The channel
also offers suggestions for customizing various "safety kits" for disasters and emergencies owing to
earthquake, extreme heat, flooding, hurricane, lightening, tornado, wildfires, and winter weather. The
Weather Channel now promotes itself as the national authority on various weather risks, referring to
itself in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as "America's Hurricane Authority." As explained below,
this form of public outreach by TV is significant because of the "public-private partnership" that the

channel has entered into with several federal emergency-relief agencies.

Preparedness for emergency and "disaster" has become central now to the Weather Channel's and
other TV networks' role in the current security society. How could living with disaster (of being
totally exposed, with a "change of the weather") be anything but the central preoccupation of a
neoliberal reasoning about maximum freedoms, do-it-yourself forms of welfare, and the Weather
Channel as one of the most reliable sources for public security? In 2005, the Weather Channel
launched the series It Could Happen Tomorrow, which enacted through a compilation of foundfootage and digitally manufactured images the effects on various US cities of a climatological disaster
(e.g., unusually high tornadic activity that lays waste to much of Dallas, Texas). More than early
prototypes such as Storm Stories or TWC's everyday reporting, It Could Happen Tomorrow
underscores the risks of weather to the security of the nation and to entire urban populations. In this
respect, it is as much about mobilizing large populations of citizens as about helping individual
citizens design personal disaster and emergency plans. The Discovery Channel offers a similar
program, Perfect Disasters, for which viewers are encouraged (through the channel's web site) to test
and grade themselves with a Hazard Quiz: "Would you survive?"
The survivalist objectives of this genre of emergency-preparedness program is noteworthy, not only
in light of its relation to other forms of factoring fear and testing one's resourcefulness to survive
away from home (e.g., Survivor and Survivoruiau), but also because of the current expectation that
citizens watch out and over themselves, their families, and households. These latter programs make
more ordinary and pro- granmiatic the techniques of figuring out (through TV) how to design a
personal support network in case of an emergency and how to cope with risk when TV becomes the
primary provider of personal security. However, in this respect, even these daily regimens of
practical preparation for ordinary emergencies intersect with current TV's game culture, where good
citizenship involves always factoring the odds so that one can be the last one standing.
Experiments in "Home Security Makeover"
Considering TV's place within the current securitization of daily life requires understanding how its
programs intersect with the safe and secure environment that viewers inhabit. To speak of
securitization as practiced within a governmental arrangement refers not only to the formal and
informal agreements about rules and proper conduct, but also to the material distribution and
emplacement of technologies for managing the life of individuals and populations. It therefore is
necessary to consider some of the ways that TV acts within the current arrangement - particularly
from and across particular places (spheres of activity and government) that are understood to be risky
in certain ways or to require certain forms of security.
No consideration of TV can ignore its long-standing relation to conceptions of domesticity, the design
of houses, and the organization and running of households. As Raymond Williams famously pointed
out, the emergence of TV cannot be understood merely as the outcome of an evolution of technologies
but as part of a widespread regime of mobility and privacy - what he referred to as "mobile
privatization.i18 One might also consider, however, how TV's emergence within mobile privatization

occurred through a particular regime of safety and security, and how TV is now being reinvented to
accommodate the "advancement" of this project.19 How have past and current regimes of mobility
and privacy, wherein various tele-technologies such as TV developed, become attuned to
technologies and programs of safety and risk management designed to make the performance of
freedoms responsible and thus governable? How has the expectation of this performance fallen upon
"homemakers," whose achievement of "home" (and particularly a home that is safe) relies upon
domestic sciences and domestic appliances - including communication appliances? And how has the
securitization of one's house and all that it holds made the home a site of active citizenship and
management, not only a sphere where one watches over oneself and one's things but also where one's
life is lived as a moral economy - the personalized regimen and system of rules that govern family life
and simultaneously allow a resident to feel most free, most oneself, and most "at home in the world"?
While there are book series such as The Complete Idiot's Guide to Home Security that parallel the
do-it-yourself guidebooks in personal finance discussed above, TV programs concerning home safety
and security - particularly those concerning the current role of TV in securing house and home - are as
much a part of current TV's mission in public "outreach" as extensions of the do-it-yourself programs
from other media. There is a swath of TV programs across various channels intended to prepare
viewers to recognize and protect themselves against a variety of personal and household safety risks.
One example of this trend is Your Home: Make it Safe on the Do-It-Yourself Network, a home
decorating network that, as its title suggests, is the paragon of possessive individualism for a middleclass household capable of affording the program tier where cable and satellite companies usually
locate this channel. Doing home safety yourself (or rather, through this program) involves awareness
of, and lessons about, how to operate and where to place standard security devices (alarms,
extinguishers, lighting, first-aid kits), how to secure doors and windows, how to "childproof' one's
home, how to "escape safely," and how to design "the look of a secure home."
One of the most remarkable convergences between reality TV's games, makeovers, behavioral
experiments, and programs for securing households has been the Discovery Channel's It Takes a Thief
This program, which extends to an interactive web site providing safety plans, checklists, and tips,
has recruited two former (now rehabilitated) thieves to break into typically suburban houses in order
to demonstrate to the homeowners and to the program's viewers steps needed to improve home
security. Unlike Cops, which during the 1990s documented urban police responses to everyday
crimes and disputes perpetrated by "at-risk" populations living outside the US suburbs, It Takes a
Thief offers a different awareness to suburban homeowners about the vulnerability of the suburban
household. Homeowners and the TV audience watch a recording of the thieves' operation captured by
surveillance equipment, which often becomes one of the remedies for these "exposed" houses and
insecure families. The nonprofessionals are then advised by security experts and the thieves-turnedadvisors about a variety of safety measures ranging from common, inexpensive techniques and
devices to home makeovers. Each broadcast concludes as the homeowners undergo a second break-in
attempt that tests/demonstrates the reliability of the new security system. As "life intervention," this
program documents an intervention on body and property that is at risk. As a staged test and
demonstration, the care of the self occurs through the program's objectification of risk - of watching
and assessing (observing for themselves) an actual (albeit staged) record/ experiment of a house's

exposure to and subsequent protection from intrusion. Like some other makeover series as "life
interventions," It Takes a Thief also reproduces the new paradigm of TV "program" as a
personal/household regimen that will be lived (or in the case of houses, lived in) beyond the specific
episode and experiment.
The economic status and lifestyle of the households selected in It Takes a Thief make them receptive
to and capable of affording a variety of "smart" technologies, such as digitally programmable sensors,
cameras, monitors, and relays. Today, the idea of the "smart home" has become synonymous with the
idea of a safe home, and the current lessons in the benefits of acquiring "smart" household
technologies and appliances regularly links their value to the improvement of household safety and
security. For instance, Your Home: Make it Safe offers entire episodes and web-site links to learn
about purchasing, operating, and arranging "smart technology" for safety purposes. Historically the
emergence of cable and satellite TV, alongside the initiatives for "reinventing government," have
converged with the fashioning of households organized and programmed through an assemblage of
often interlocking digital appliances. These digital appliances' capacity to monitor and to run/manage
various domestic tasks was tantamount to a new rationality about freedoms at home and of being at
home away from home, and thus became integral to an emerging political reasoning that valued
citizens' self-sufficiency and self-directedness - a "neoliberalization of the domestic sphere. ,21 This
ideal and rationality have been fundamental to companies such as Invensys Home Control Systems
(IHCS), which since the late 1990s has designed and installed home networks for remote sensing and
remote control of the household's various programmable appliances - networks that IHCS promises
will allow inhabitants to customize/personalize home management and to run her/his household at a
distance, away from home or at home. The intelligence of a household - a regimen of applications and
a rationality/science of home management for achieving "domestic freedoms" - thus has become a
means of securing the household. Freedom, as the achievement of privacy and mobility through an
array of technological applications, carries certain risks and responsibilities and is thus an objective
of personalized risk management, at home and away from home.

Illustration 4.2 Professional burglars illustrate problems and techniques of home security on It Takes
a Thief (Lion Television for Discovery Channel, 2006)
These integrated services and systems of home-management technology have coincided with the
growth of home-security services, so that wiring/networking houses to detect multiple threats and
risks (e.g., home invasion, fire, or personal injury) requires emergency assistance.' While homesecurity services have relied on programmable equipment, sensing devices, and telecommunication
with remote dispatchers and municipal emergency services, some of these services (e.g., Bolt Home
Systems) also have designed and installed homeentertainment and home-communication systems,
further making the implementation of home safety and security integral to the hardwiring and software
applications of communication and entertainment activities. And as evidenced by It Takes a Thief and
the safety-demonstration programs of home-makeover TV on channels such as Home & Garden and
Do It Yourself, the smart household is a habitus (a sphere of productivity reliant upon property,
technical competence, and cultural capital) that has been most energetically reproduced, managed,
and safeguarded by a particular social class and lifestyle cluster. In the first episode of It Takes a
Thief, the security experts-cum-housebreakers target a house that is full of luxury items.
One other connection worth making is between the homemanagement services, home-security
services, and TV cable and satellite services. The current injunction that households provide for their
own security (albeit through services) has required cable and satellite coin- panies to expand their
role in helping households monitor and manage the risks of particular media that enter the home. TV
safety "outreach" involves a paradox whereby the federal government allows the cable industry to
police itself by providing the technology that allows customers the "freedom" to regulate access to TV
at home. Most national cable companies, such as Insight Communication, promote their menus of
devices protecting households from unwanted TV programs (e.g., filters on digital cable-boxes, DVR
filters, "traps" installed upon request, and V-chips, which were mandated by Congress for all TV sets
above 13 inches built after January, 2000 and which block programs according to the industry's eighttier rating-system). In 2005, the cable industry initiated an awareness campaign, "Cable Puts You in
Control," touting this menu of self-regulative options.
The cable industry's self-regulating devices for households, however, are just one facet of a robust
ensemble of services, networks, hardware, and software designed to protect households from
undesirable media. In 2005-6, The Learning Channel broadcast Hackers, a program that (in a
variation of It Takes a Thief) represents risk-taking strategies used by computer hackers, the risk they
represent to personal computing and households, and the tactics that can be deployed to secure one's
household from their intrusive activities. Furthermore, the selfmonitoring features of contemporary
media technologies are often represented as essential for assuring the security of all one's property. In
a TV advertisement for AOL antivirus computer software that ran during 2003 and 2004, AOL's
ability to insulate a two-story colonial, suburban house from undesirable and polluting elements was
represented through a scenario involving gale-force winds (carrying various objects) that collapse
one of the house's walls, making it vulnerable to the outside. The commercial depicted "firewalling"
as a link between the threat to one's personal computer and the threat to one's house and household."
Learning how to use one's personal computer or TV and DVIZ systems involves learning about how to
protect them, and one's personal information and intellectual property, through these security

programs. Paradoxically, TV and its imbrication in domestic communication networks threaten the
privacy and moral economy of households even as these media provide the solutions and technical
support for managing those threats.
The value of these technologies has been readily articulated to a "pro-family" political rationality that
considers the household as "at risk" by the circulation of TV and other media. Family Safe Media,
which promotes itself as "preserving family values in a media-driven society," offers an array of
technologies for the self-regulating media household: filters for DVD players, TV and video-game
"time managers," a profinity filter (titled the "TV Guardian"), remote controls for kids (titled "Weemote"), a computer time-manager (titled "PC Cop"), power-plug locks, filtering-tool software (the
"Net Protector" with accompanying "porn-addiction info"), mobile cameras and monitors, phone-line
locks and blocks, and TV-channel blockers (the "TV B-Gone"). That this "pro-family" political
rationality is so attached to the vast array of self-regulating technologies and to the expectation that
households should regulate media for themselves underscores the extent to which mobilizing citizens
to actively manage the security of home can be a matter of legislating morality. The efforts of Family
Safe Media may be considered more overtly politicized than what occurs in most households, but
their efforts also remind us that learning how to use the communication technologies "safely" and
"wisely" in the everyday running of households is as much ethical as political. The "life
interventions" or "home makeovers" that Family Safe Media seek uphold a political rationale about
self-government ("helping families protect themselves") as much as they affirm that self-regulating
media households are moral economies for regulating proper conduct.
Maintaining the "smart" household is increasingly part of a general economy of safety and security
equipment and operational know-how. Smart technologies have become an integral part of services
for do-ityourself safety and security. Companies such as KeepSafer, WEMA ("We Monitor
America"), the Home Security Store, Smart Home, Safety Depot, and Security Depot all sell various
kinds of video monitoring devices and systems, along with a variety of other security and safety
hardware and manuals. The web site for Safety Depot (www. shop.safetydepot.com) provides "steps"
for redressing various kinds of household risks, and links for securing each standard room in a house
- "room-by-room product navigation." Security Depot (www.asecu- ritydepot.com) offers web
shopping for several thousand kinds of personal- and home-safety equipment. The equipment in these
stores is also commonly available now through the major hardware retail chains in the United States,
such as Home Depot, Lowes, and Office Depot. And the circuit between these security equipment and
service providers and TV's home-security makeovers has become stronger, as Extreme Makeover:
Home Edition has undertaken two home makeovers that included new home-security systems sold at
Sears and as the onscreen experts in It Takes a Thief appeared as the keynote speakers for the 2005
International Security Conference (a trade show attended by manufacturers and distributors of the
latest personal-security 23 technology).
Although this section has dealt primarily with TV's role in securing its traditional site, the home, it is
worth adding that home security also matters beyond the household - and precisely because video
screens are no longer restricted to domestic use. TV is also increasingly part of networks of
surveillance and of safety education that extend into domains of daily life beyond the home. The
portability of video-monitoring devices allows individuals to monitor and manage their household's

health from a distance. Closed-circuit video systems have become an ubiquitous, though generally
invisible, technology for monitoring risky behavior on city streets and in a wide variety of
commercial spaces.24 The design of public and commercial space increasingly accommodates these
systems. The forms of personal datacollection have multiplied and also are part of the design of
convenience and speed in day-to-day living: the use of credit cards at different locations in our daily
life provides a record of both our purchases and our paths. As home security becomes part of
networks and services that extend beyond the home - rationalized as providing greater
freedoms/mobility and safety/security - they therefore provide all the conveniences of home away
from home.25 In this respect, the paradox of TV's reinvention through safe media and media safety is
that self-regulation is a means to greater personal independence, and that greater mobility requires
that citizens be willing and able to assess and manage their own personal risks, and see to their own
security, as if they were always at home.
The Many Responsibilities of the New Citizen-Soldier
Amid the growing number of stores, services, and programs discussed above that offer a wide range
of safety equipment, there have been a few specialty outlets, such as Safer America
(www.saferamerica.com), that market gear suited to catastrophic emergencies - equipment such as
gas masks, radiation detectors, full body-protection suits, "family survival kits," and Life-Cenders (a
"personal escape system" comprising rope and harness for emergency escapes from the windows of
multistory buildings). Ten years ago, marketing such safety products was less common, and probably
perceived as more strange, than today. However, they still do not comprise the kind of equipment that
is demanded by a large group of consumers and households, or figure in daily use, as preparedness
for emergencies and catastrophes is mobilized through resources such as the Weather Channel. At the
same time, the products offered by Safer America, rationalized as responses to terrorist threats
through books such as How to Tell Your Children about Terrorism, also vividly underscore the
normalization/ domestication of safety equipment formerly used only by professionals such as
firefighters, riot squads, decontaminators, and soldiers. Collectively these sites for safety resources
comprise a professionalization of the culture of everyday home safety, and the shaping of a new
citizen-soldier.
In the recent Congressional debate about US border and immigration policy, a few congressmen
proposed, in addition to erecting a network of fencing along the US-Mexican border, building a
network of surveillance cameras that could be accessed in real time by anyone with a personal
computer. The system could mobilize "real" citizens to aid the Department of Homeland Security and
regional borderenforcement agencies in watching out for illegal entries into the United States. And
while this experiment in border management and national security may never come to pass, it acts
upon the kinds of services, networks, and programs discussed in this chapter.
The formation of a Homeland Security and the Bush administration's declaration of an "endless war
on terror" in the immediate aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks acted upon the various
initiatives and experiments for reinventing government that had been occurring since at least the
1980s. As Homeland Security Director, Michael Chertofl; stated in 2006:

as we rise to meet the threat of terrorism, we must face each day with ... a commitment ... to "think
anew" and to "act anew" . . . We must draw on the strength of our considerable network of assets,
functioning as seamlessly as possible with state and local leadership, first responders, the private
sector, ... and most certainly the general public.
If a Homeland Security has made sense and gained traction in the United States, it has done so not
only through the increasingly common practice of outsourcing to private companies the tasks
delegated in the past to the US military, but also through mobilizing and acting upon an array of
public-private partnerships and the private-outreach programs oriented toward various kinds of
security. It has done so not only by mobilizing the national guard to conduct new kinds of operations
(fighting a war overseas, patrolling the streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, or preventing
illegal immigration) but also by expanding, repurposing, and acting upon the array of technologies and
programs through which nonmilitary citizens have been expected to look after their own welfare and
security - to be the new first line of defense. In these ways, the formation of a Homeland Defense and
the waging of a war on terror have become central to the current governmental rationality about
freedom and security as intertwined objectives.
One of the support networks into which Homeland Security has inserted itself is the Citizen Corps,
whose web site enjoins citizens to "Be Informed, Be Prepared, and Take Action!" True to the
federalist rationality of other current "public services" during the Bush administration, the Citizen
Corps' response to emergency management and preparation is decidedly local and "do-it-yourself,"
with the federal government in an exhortative and "supportive" posture. The web site for Citizen Corp
(www.citizencorps.gov) not only represents links to the Department of Homeland Security but to a
menu of volunteer programs, such as Community Emergency Response Team Program, the Fire Corps,
the Neighborhood Watch Program, the Medical Reserve Program, and the Volunteer Police Service.
And within the current penchant for linking social welfare with civilian defense and self-defense, it
both professionalizes and paramilitarizes citizens as "first-responders," creating a "corps" of citizens.
It also articulates the nurturing of "community" as a public good with the actively defensive and
protective techniques learned by citizens. To this end, the Citizen Corp is organized as a network of
Citizen Corps Councils, the community-based administrators of both local and national security.
Maximizing personal freedoms, "supported" by minimizing government ("constraining government
spending" as "economic government"), also has expanded one's exposure to risk, which in turn
requires greater vigilance and ever updated and more robust microstrategies for calculating and
managing these risks. According to the National Strategy for Homeland Security (a rationale by and
for the Department of Homeland Security, July 2002), "our free society is inherently vulnerable"
(emphasis added). Or put another way, the strategies for waging an endless war on terror have
become a way of rationalizing the campaign to maximize self-sufficiency.
The link between the recently formed Department of Homeland Security and TV and other media is
one dimension of the State's current experiments in governing through private and personal security
programs, and is an increasingly dominant dimension of the current security society in the United
States. As much as the Bush administration's creation of a massive new federal program has been
questioned as anathema to the neoconservative and neoliberal valorization of "small government," the

department has become a paradigm of government service whose idea of service is to make citizens
responsible rather than to foster dependency. 16 It thus actively seeks to energize private resources
and citizens to look after themselves through do-it-yourself resources found on the Web and TV. The
Department of Homeland Security's "Ready.gov" campaign, which seeks to educate and prepare
citizens for various kinds of emergencies and catastrophes, relies heavily on citizens taking the
initiative to seek out resource networks and on linking citizens to web sites for privately provided
security materials and services. In this respect, the Department not only relies upon media programs
but operates through procedures similar to TV outreach, stitching itself into relay systems for active
citizens and, as was the case in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, chastising citizens who were not
responsible in recognizing risk and in learning about how to manage their own individual survival.
Or, as the former director of the Department of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, stated at a Public
Preparedness Symposium:
Our goal is to achieve seamless protection; a nation knit tightly together by shared vigilance,
readiness and communication. Vigilance, readiness and communication. And nowhere is this more
important than in the area of emergency preparedness ... If you've ever watched the Weather Channel
when they talk about some of those individual stories in the midst of some of these horrific natural
events and how the people actually saved themselves because they knew what to do before the event
occurred and they just did it; it was a reflex. They had it prepared. They had thought about it and did
it.
While the FCC has long required commercial TV to reserve bandwidth for "emergency broadcasting"
(a practice that made TV responsive to programs in "civil defense" during the Cold War), TV's new
role as "emergency broadcast system" is about expanding the range of risks and the services for do-ityourself security.'
Although there have been recent TV dramas that represent efforts by the US government to combat
foreign "terrorist" activities in the United States (e.g., 48 Hours and the made-for-TV movie,
Homeland Security), there have been a larger number of programs that demonstrate survival skills - at
home or away from home. Series such as Survivor, Survivorrnan, Road Rules, and National
Geographic Channel's Worlds Apart (about US families who abandon their comfortable and lavish
homes in the United States to share a home with a family in an "underdeveloped" part of the world for
several weeks) all involve learning survival techniques required when facing the risks of leaving
home, and the current Homeland. TV's educational programs about recognizing personal risk and
learning safety techniques are the everyday engines of a Homeland Security's campaign to make
citizens productive of their own security. Chertoffs claim above, that the Department of Homeland
Security is about reiuveutiugg government, depends upon future programs of home makeover such as
It Takes a Thief and other "hone-security makeover shows" in which the care of the self involves
testing a household's threshold of risk and capacity for security. Perhaps Director Chertoff s claim
that the Department of Homeland Security is committed to "thinking and acting anew" refers not just to
the department's place within the current efforts to "reinvent government" for a new security society
(one designed for "an endless war on terror") but to Homeland Security's "extreme makeover" after
its failures responding to Hurricane Katrina - its first major national emergency and its first liveaction televised demonstration and test of its capabilities. Four years after the formation of a

Homeland Security in the United States, it's become difficult to tell how the title and mission of
Homeland Security (as mobilizing a "home front") is entirely separate from a home security makeover
show - how "national security" involves anything but the everyday technical achievements of personal
"home security."

Chapter 5

TV's Constitutions of Citizenship

Governing Ourselves through TV: New Constitutions
In an episode of ABC's Supernanny broadcast in 2006, Nanny Jo Frost assesses and seeks to redress
problems that a single mother is having running her household and managing her three young children.
Midway through the episode, she advises the mom on the need for a "family routine." The nanny
rationalizes this solution by stating that the mom needs to "take ownership through a household
constitution." She then formulates and posts on a wall a set of "house rules," a private contract or
covenant by which all of the family members are supposed to abide. Living by this contract is enacted
and enforced as a game, through which the children are rewarded for playing by the rules, and mom is
rewarded by having her household returned to her control. Later in the episode, the nanny addresses
the viewers directly in a "public service" announcement, explaining how they can learn from what
they've seen and why they should formulate their own household constitutions.
This chapter considers reality TV as a resource for coustitutiu,Q households, neighborhoods, and
other spheres of everyday government. We use the term "constitution" to refer to television's role in
eiiactiug and shaping (constituting) spaces and populations.' Superuailuy, for example, offers
demonstrations in reinventing a healthy household. The term also suggests the extent to which TV
presents itself as a resource for establishing the rules and standards (constitutions) of belonging and
participation that make the group a comity, or a peaceful and orderly association where the rights and
differences of all citizens should be respected. Constitutions are a basis for liberal government's
emphasis on fairness, collective participation, rights, and limits of government. While the "household
constitution" established by Supernanny is not a constitution like those formulated by cities or nationstates, it similarly establishes the rights and rules for living and governing fairly and judiciously in
this house. In this respect, the household constitution is a technical way of maintaining not only order
and respect but also mutuality and fairness at home. Unlike city or state constitutions, the household
constitution is also drawn up with citizen-subjects (the family members), even though it is designed
and explained by a privately contracted expert - a "governess." As Foucault demonstrated, liberal
government developed out of, and through, the government of children, families, and households. This
takes on a new dimension in the present political epoch, however. As one way of helping private
groups "take ownership" of their governance, TV's private constitutions have become integral to the
administration of the current stage of liberalism in the United States, and a new model of citizenship
characterized by George W. Bush as an Ownership Society.
The household is arguably the smallest framework for group governance in the daily lives of most
people. As comity, a neighborhood is also a sphere where sociality and mutuality depend upon
common institutions and administrative bodies with more or less formalized guidelines for making
collective decisions, managing differences, acting civilly, guaranteeing pleasant and friendly
association, and being a "good neighbor." A neighborhood covenant, like the "house rules" in
Superuanny, is also not exactly a constitution designed and administered by elected legislators,
policy-makers, judges, and civil servants. A neighborhood covenant is a privately designed and
administered set of rules for members of an association - members whose relation to these rules

makes them citizens not only of the laws of the State, but of the neighborhood constitution as well.
Increasingly, neighborhood covenants, or the rules affecting condos or gated communities or (what is
left of) public housing, have become common ways of governing the places where everyday life is
lived.
While not all households and neighborhoods abide by the same rules or are as invested in developing
a group constitution as the families who appear on TV programs like Supernanny, TV has come to
play an important technical role in this new regime of privately administered government. What
should we make of TV's current strategies for constituting households, neighborhoods, workplaces,
and towns as forms of private association and membership, and as forms of group government? How
does TV's practice of staging "citizenship tests" as experiments in group government matter within the
current governmental rationality? And, what does this trend have to do with the discourse of
"reinventing government"? To address these questions, we need to consider briefly some of the
general objectives of our analysis. This book does not seek to understand or explain liberalism as a
monolithic, universal form of government. Instead the book recognizes a paradox about liberal
government: its aspiration toward making rational and fair (through the provision of rights and laws)
a government for all citizens, even as the constitutions of government (over time and around the
world) have not advocated the same set of rights and laws. As such, liberal government aspires to a
universalisru (i.e., government "for all") that is specific to local constitutions.
But how local and specific? Liberalism's historical and geographic specificity - its diversity - is not
simply the variety of stational constitutions of government. Understanding liberalism purely as
government by the State involves recognizing at the very least the interplay between government of a
nation and government of regional and urban administrations.' There is another kind of interplay,
however, between the State forms of administration and the "nongovernmental" programs of
governance. Our focus here is on the multiplicity and diversity of private constitutions through which
governance is made rational and administered, in and beyond nation-states. These would include the
private government of households, of universities, condo associations and gated-communities,
corporate management, sports associations, NGOs, and so forth. Sometimes, these privately
administered constitutions comprise networks of government. Each of us may be subject to the rules
and covenants of multiple private entities. And sometimes, the constitutions of private government are
in conflict with one another, or with the laws and codes enacted and administered by the State.
One way of understanding the longevity and ubiquity of liberalism, particularly liberal government's
diversity, is by considering how the State acts upon the variety of formal and informal guidelines and
contracts administered by private associations, households, and personal regimens.' The introduction
of liberal government in Afghanistan, for instance, may have been encouraged by the United States (an
extension of a US model of liberalism, or an imagined stage for "advancing" liberalism in the Middle
East), but the formulation of an "Islamic constitution" in Afghanistan underscores the local and
specific universalism of liberalism's constitution. Government by the State is constituted through
religious and cultural institutions that authorize specific forms of association, participation, and
membership in Afghanistan. The double meaning of "constitution" that we have adopted, however,
allows us to emphasize another point: Liberalism's survival (or "advancement") has depended upon
the ongoing demonstration and testing of a State's formally constituted laws but also of the informal

civic laboratories - venues for civic pedagogy - and for experimenting with and testing the rules and
guidelines of the private associations comprising a civil society.'
One way reality TV operates within current strategies of government in the United States is through
the technical constitutions of household, neighborhood, and other private entities that comprise civil
society. In this respect, our focus is less on how TV programs advance a "neoliberal" ideology than
on the practical demonstrations about the rules and techniques for membership and participation in
private groups. These are techniques that are encountered daily and are continually tested and
customized, through TV and other media. While "good citizenship" may involve a particular relation
to the State, it also is performed daily through the rules and government of "healthy" households,
"good" neighborhoods, and the other private entities that comprise what currently is considered a
"civil" society. These are rules and informal guidelines for belonging, proper behavior, rights, active
participation, and making a specific kind of place to live. Although it is possible to describe
"constitutions of the self' (the regimens and programs through which the self is made active technologized - in particular ways), this chapter is mostly concerned with TV's models, strategies,
and constitutions of group government. From that perspective, this chapter considers how
"technologies of the self' or "selfconstitution" are about the rules and techniques for becoming a good
family member, neighbor, co-worker, etc.
Reality TV's testing of citizens sometimes resemble social and behavioral experiments, but they also
operate as judicial trials. The relation between "test" and "trial" is not simply blurred in these TV
series, it is a point of interface between the series' proto-scientific experiments in individual and
group behavior and the series' privatization of the processes of overseeing group government. In this
latter sense, some reality TV series demonstrate the privately administered laws necessary to become
an active citizen. If group government is to proceed in an orderly way, it requires displays (trials) by
its citizens that prove the rationality of government; it requires putting citizensubjects in front of a
privately authorized judge (such as a Supernanny) or a panel of jurists who decide which citizens
have acted responsibly and within the technical rules of conduct. Like courtroom trials conducted by
the State, private trials like those on reality TV continually put on exhibit the virtues of a privately
designed constitution and privately administered citizenship.
Although reality TV operates as demonstrations and experiments in group government, there also is a
ludic dimension to its experimentalism and testing of individuals, families, teams, neighborhoods, and
towns. The technical means of reinventing government are integral to the rules for playing
"citizenship-contests" and the "games of government." Implementing the household constitution in
Supernanny, for instance, involves a game of citizenship played by rules. To the extent that TV
educates about the proper forms of belonging, of managing differences, and of participation by
citizens in various spheres of life, this education occurs as playful or sporting task in the current
regime of TV. Learning, mastering, and performing the "rules of the game" is tantamount to successful
performances of membership and citizenship. Reality TV's citizenship game, as a form of
entertainment, is thus tantamount to its operation as a social/behavioral experiment (testing the
citizens' capacities and limits) and as a trial (testing the worthiness of subjects to act freely and
responsibly as citizens).

Welcome to the Neighborhood: TV's Citizenship Tests

One example of citizen education through TV was the long-running PBS series Mr. Roger's
Neighborhood, whose opening song extolled the eternally "beautiful day in the neighborhood." The
series offered a regimen of friendly and gentle advice, demonstrations, games, and exercises for
children (citizens-in-the-making) about how to get along in their neighborhoods - about how to grow
into good, active, caring, and responsible citizens through TV. Less overtly didactic TV genres such
as the domestic comedy and soap opera have played a role in enacting neighborhood - rehearsing the
problems, threats, and challenges to the neighborhoods' and households' private rule-making and
membership.' As we explained in the Introduction, there is a long history of TV and other media
offering instruction in and demonstrations of citizenship.` However, TV's relation to the current
regime of civic pedagogy has relied upon decidedly different strategies for demonstrating and
modeling citizenship - ones that have become technically part of the political process and the political
reform associated with "reinventing government." Neighborliness - daily citizenship and governance may still involve lessons, as in earlier TV comedy or Mr. Roger's NeiE'hborhood, but achieving it
now occurs on a decidedly unsettled terrain of the games and contests of group government, one that
makes banal as well as ratchets up the political stakes of TV's citizenship tests. These are games and
contests that allow players to demonstrate, for judges and TV viewers, how well they can perform the
expectations of citizenship according to the rules of a community constitution. Sometimes, TV's new
strategies for testing citizenship do demonstrate good government and "good TV," and sometimes they
become the object of political demonstrations.
On May 10, 2005, ABC announced that two months later it would begin broadcasting a new TV
series, Welcome to the Neighborlood. According to ABC, the series would involve "one of seven
diverse families [who] will win a beautiful dream home on a perfect suburban cul-de-sac in Austin,
Texas. But in order to win the luxuriously furnished and opulently appointed house, they must first
win over the very people who will be the most affected by the ultimate decision - the next-door
neighbors." Welcome to the Neighborhood was conceived by ABC as a summer replacement for
Desperate Housewives, which had attracted a large audience to ABC on Sunday evenings. Both
series mixed elements of the sitcom and soap opera in their representation of life around a suburban
cul-de-sac. Welcome to the Neighborhood also followed the conventions of the game show, typical of
many reality TV programs. Like other contemporary TV (e.g., The Apprentice and Wife Swap),
Welcome to the Neighborhood was a regulated experiment that tested and demonstrated the limits of
real-life subjects, their abilities to perform in accordance with certain rules of the game. However,
precisely in this way, the series was an experiment for demonstrating the wise and effective
government by neighbors. And this dimension of Welcome to the Neighborhood is noteworthy
because it became an assessment of what constitutes (in the civic sense) "good" TV and about TV's
judgment and ability to regulate itself.
Though each episode may have represented a slight modification of behavior and thought among all
the participants, the network's initial statements about the series' production emphasized the catharsis
that the homeowners (and secondarily the prospective neighbors) would undergo. The homeowners'
interactions with the contestants would test the homeowner's ideological and cultural limits, their

ability to enact their vision and ground rules of what a "neighborhood" should be, and thus their
ability to maintain the physical appearance and boundaries (the "gated"-ness) of their neighborhood:
With every encounter with these families, the opinionated neighbors' pre-conceived assumptions and
prejudices are also chipped away, and they learn that, while on the outside we may appear different,
deep inside we share many common bonds. The judges find themselves learning to see people, not
stereotypes. The three neighborhood families who will be judging the competing families all love
their quiet, picturesque community and are used to a certain kind of neighbor - one who looks and
thinks just like them ... Each competing family ends up taking the neighborhood judges on an
emotional journey that opens eyes and hearts. In the end, one family's life will definitely change when
they will the deed to the house and move into the pristine home. But much to the surprise of everyone
involved, a whole community experiences a transformation.
The homeowners shared more than their love of "their quiet, picturesque community" and the same
residential turf. They all were white, wealthy enough to afford newly constructed 3,500-square-foot
houses with four bedrooms and two and a half baths costing $300,000- $400,000. They possessed
sufficient personal transportation to live in a recently developed and relatively remote suburban area,
a relatively recent Austin, TX subdivision branded as "Circle C." And they were relatively
unabashed about their Republican and Christian affiliations, or at least unabashed enough to express
and put to the test those positions on national TV. The homeowners selected to participate in the
series were the Stewarts (whose patriarch referred to himself as the cul-de-sac's "governor"), the
Bellamys (a Republican dad whose children were less sure of their political orientation), and the
Daniels (an avowed Christian family who claimed to prefer "similar" neighbors).
Unlike studio-produced TV series in which the characters' every action is scripted, a reality TV
series such as this one involved a slightly different set of management strategies. Producers located
proper settings, participants, and conditions in order to produce a kind of televised experiment, in
part about effective governance and citizenship. Homeowners acted as private "judges" and
"governors" of families actively seeking to become citizens (and future judges) in this neighborhood.
The series' producers acknowledged having selected the residents of the cul-de-sac in Circle C Ranch
(a subdivision whose population is 80 percent white) not only for their physical propinquity but their
demographically calculated cultural orientation. The experiment displayed the limits of the
participants' cultural capital, their commitment to the material properties of what a neighborhood
should be and look like, and their ability to represent civic virtues that mattered to them individually
and collectively. For the homeowners, good governance demonstrated, in this sense, good citizenship.
The series also was a political experiment for testing the homeowners' ("neighbors"') abilities to
govern various kinds of problems - particularly, how best to govern one's neighborhood, household,
family/children, and self while remaining true to the rules and fairness of a democracy game. The
series thus tested neighbor-contestants' abilities to remain tolerant, fair, and "open-minded," to keep
the process of inclusion and exclusion fair and rule-driven, and to conduct themselves as model
citizens - at least a model of citizenship suited to life in the cul-de-sac and suited to life in the United
States from the cul-de-sac. Although the series' publicity statement emphasized that the transformation
of the neighborhood would be "a surprise to all involved," the experiment (at all levels of its
production) also was about learning how best to manage, act upon, and instrumentalize individualism

and difference, change and surprise - how best to solve problems within the rules. If Circle C is a
new settlement, an effort to achieve and manage a "neighborhood," then the series experimented with
the unsettling conditions upon which the settlement was constructed.
This is not to say that the experiment merely pitted owners (as governors/judges) against those who
lacked that authority or who were completely unformed as citizens (subjects waiting to be shaped).
As political experiment, the series was about the aspiring neighbors actively and voluntarily
participating in a game of governance - of testing and demonstrating their ability to play by the rules,
to manage their own families and selves effectively, and to complete tasks that represented their
commitment to neighborhood government and citizenship, even if they were not yet authorized within
this neighborhood to be judges. The aspiring neighbors were selected to represent a more "diverse"
population and demographic, a diversity that both perpetuated and complicated stereotypical
identities and lifestyle clusters.7 In one sense, all of these families represented (particularly for
Circle C) a compendium of current family-experiments in the United States, whose "experimentalism"
(deviation from the "normal" family unit) was itself a problem for the forms of self-governance
practiced by the WASP-ish nuclear-families populating Circle C.
Given that the aspiring neighbors in this series lacked the economic and cultural capital for readily
participating in neighborhood government and citizenship in Circle C Ranch, the series positioned the
homeowners as overseers. The primary task of the homeowners involved a fundamental paradox of
liberal government: developing strategies of government that also are strategies for helping to
empower the aspiring homeowners. It was the homeowners' prerogative to watch over and watch out
for, to preside over, take responsibility for, and thus assist those who desire to play by the rules and
(by playing/performing well) to become part of the neighborhood. In this sense, Welcome to the
NeiOiborhood was supposed to have followed in ABC's Sunday-evening schedule after Extreme
Makeover: Home Edition - a series which involves the effort by private, technical experts to assist a
socially and economically handicapped household achieve its full potential.
Following Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Welcome to the Nei'hbor- hood even had the potential
to demonstrate the strategies of what the Bush administration (in describing its own political
experiments) has referred to as "compassionate conservatism" for an "ownership society." Good
governance and good citizenship in and from Circle C thus tested and demonstrated the abilities of
homeowners, as "neighbors," to help those who actively seek to improve themselves by moving into
the neighborhood. As the Bush administration has consistently emphasized, this kind of social welfare
depends upon private rather than State forms of care-giving and assistance and upon a citizenry
actively engaged in helping themselves. In this respect, neighborhood becomes an objective and a
resource for mobilizing what Bush has referred to as "the armies of compassion" and for
administering forms of social welfare upon which an "ownership society" (homeownership as well as
owning up to one's responsibilities) models good government and good citizenship.
Welcome to the Neighborhood serves as a useful way to begin this chapter in part because it was a
series never broadcast. Its failure highlights the experimentalism pervading the new model of "TV
program" at various levels - TV as experiments in the best techniques to selfempowerment, as locally
and privately administered social service for helping, guiding, and shaping citizens, and in this way

as a resource that has come to matter for the current experiments in the arts and science of
government. Many factors contributed to the program's failure, and a variation on this particular
experiment may emerge in the near future, especially since there is much that is familiar and not
surprising about the way that it pushed the limits of "good TV." Since few people actually have seen
this program, however, it serves as a reminder that TV programs are more than the sense that they
make of the world, or the sense TV viewers make of the program's televisual world. It serves as a
reminder that TV programs (even those never broadcast) are objects of intense regulation by various
institutions. From the moment that Welcome to the Neighborhood went into production, it became the
point of relatively intense discussion about how reality TV had broken not only rules and codes of
what is considered good or proper entertainment, but potentially had broken the law.
Welcome to the Neighborhood might have become part of ABC's Sunday-night schedule in July, 2005
were it not for interventions made particularly by the National Fair Housing Association (NFHA), the
National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIH), and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation (GLAAD). All of these associations are examples of ways that "neighborhood" is the
object of regulation and government by the State as well as by private, "nongovernmental"
organizations. And all are examples of "citizen groups" whose activism is geared toward "social
justice" and "civil rights." The NFHA is a privately supported group reporting noncompliance with
the Title 8 of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 (the part of the Civil Rights Act pertaining to Fair Housing
and commonly referred to as the Fair Housing Act), which prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental,
and financing of dwellings, and in other housing-related transactions, based on race, color, national
origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. According to Shanna Smith, President and CEO of
the NFHA, Welcome to the Neighborhood violated the spirit and intent of the Federal Housing Act
because the series' game of homeownership and neighborhood governance was inseparable from the
production process's violation of federal laws protecting homebuyers from discrimination.
Complicating the series' violation of the FHA was the allowance made by various states to administer
fair-housing laws and codes. The Texas Fair Housing Act, for instance, covers "most housing
[though] ... in some circumstances, the Act exempts ... housing operated by organizations and private
clubs that limit occupancy to members." While neither ABC nor the NFHA acknowledged that the
Texas statute might have allowed the series to stage a game with these rules, the statute is worth
mentioning because it underscores precisely how the program worked within a fairly established
reasoning about local and state rights. Furthermore, the conflict over the series is an example of how
the sanctioning of private governance ("neighborhood government" or "community government") to
implement its own rules has increasingly been litigated (in courtrooms rather than TV) to sort out the
sovereignty of private government in relation to public/ state government. The Circle-C Ranch
subdivision is governed by a "homeowner's association" that administers and enforces rules
established by the association for every homeowner. The action by the NFHA thus occurred at the
intersection between private government and "political government" - a televisual staging of a game
about homeownership in a suburban gated community, in a state sanctioning the sovereignty of
"neighborhood rule."
Collectively, the interventions by the NFHA and GLAAI) underscore the complicated and
multidimensional process of group government, and particularly the complicated intersections

between government by State constitutions and government by private covenants that occur in the
current stage of liberalism." In certain respects, the actions by these "nongovernmental" overseers,
and the subsequent decision by ABC not to air Welcome to the Neighborhood, was a newsworthy
item from May through July of 2005. The NGOs threatened but never pursued court action, and the
network's decision not to broadcast any episodes of the series was arguably a strategy for
demonstrating its civic conscientiousness (the network as fair, rational, "socially responsible," and
"civic-minded" - committed to the virtues of liberal government). The government of television thus
occurred without direct intervention by state institutions of government.
The challenges to the civic virtues of Welcome to the Neighborhood (i.e., the problems of "governing
the neighborhood" and governing through "neighborhood") also pertain to the trend in corporate
"outreach" discussed in Chapter 1, particularly to ABC's "Better Community" initiative.' While
Welcome to the Neighborhood would have been yet another TV program through which ABC could
have practiced (and promoted its civic virtue as) the new trend in corporate "outreach," the Better
Community initiative also served to deflect the kinds of criticisms and political demonstrations
directed at the neighborhood cul-de-sac by NGOs such as GLAAD and the NFHA. Such are the
current political stakes and contradictions of governing, and governing through, the televisual
citizenship of neighborhood and community.
This example needs to be pushed one step further, by returning to one other way that the series'
production, experimentalism, and prohibition involved the mechanisms of private and selfgovernment: the Circle-C Ranch Homeowners' Association. The series never directly connected the
game of homeownership and neighborhood government/citizenship to the subdivision's form of
private government and "self-determination," though homeowner associations have become (since the
1990s in particular) ubiquitous entities governing life in residential areas. The practice of "gating"
has become coterminous with the formation of homeowner associations that regulate various kinds of
conduct in residential enclaves, and that link these regulations to the formation and maintenance of
"neighborhood." The web site for the Circle C Homeowners Association, for instance, states:
It's the neighborhood that matters. From talking to prospective homebuyers, we've learned a lot about
what's important to you. You want to live in a place ... where education is the finest, where lasting
friends are made, where security and safety are a part of everyday life, where leisure and recreation
are as close as your front door and, most of all, a place where families come first. Every part of
Circle C Ranch is designed to provide the people who live here with that extra special something
which truly defines the term "neighborhood."
Appreciation for a great neighborhood. One of the best bonuses in our efforts to become Austin's
finest neighborhood is the opportunity made for your home to significantly appreciate in value. Our
emphasis will always be on the human side of creating a neighborhood, but it's nice to know that as
we achieve our goals, the marketplace recognizes the value of such an effort. When you buy a home in
Circle C, there will be countless aspects of the neighborhood which you will appreciate; not the least
of which will be the true appreciation of your investment.
While neighborhood is an "investment," managing the investment wisely involves oversight,

vigilance, and active involvement in various aspects of life - in various ways that neighborhood is
enacted, achieved, and valued. The televisual game of homeownership and neighborhood government
is not merely a signification, distortion, or simulation of Circle C's games of homeownership and
neighborhood government. Rather, these are interlocking and interdependent technologies of
government and citizenship. The promotional programs for Circle C are part of a trend in marketing
research that uses polling to determine buyers of suburban residential developments who share
certain "values" - polls whose questions to prospective residents are used to identify "values
subcultures," such as differentiating buyers who are "traditionalists" from those who are "cultural
creatives.i10 Furthermore, Circle C's web site offers a constantly updated schedule of games ("fun
contests" and participatory events) that are directed toward cementing neighborhood, and thus
particular forms of citizenship. The games are, to wed the terminology of reality TV and immigration
law, "citizenship tests." As in the TV series, Circle C's events ask homeowners to be "judges" and
careful/vigilant players in these games, for instance identifying a photo of a mysterious but common
object in the neighborhood - a game not entirely unlike the televisual one involving homeowners'
oversight of exotic families in their neighborhood. In this sense, the tasks devised by the producers of
Welcome to the Neighborhood are not particularly far-fetched, surprising, or limitpushing. They are
integral to the rational governance of citizens in these times.
By July, 2005, at the height of the national and local controversy surrounding Welcome to the
Neighborhood, the Circle C Homeowners Association's monthly business meeting addressed the
negative publicity that the association felt had been generated about their neighborhood - publicity
that not only "cast a shadow" over the subdivision but that threatened property values. As the minutes
of the meeting that were posted on the association's web site indicated, the controversy became the
first order of business:
Quentin introduced the homeowner forum. Homeowner Ryan Garcia spoke on the ABC television
series, "Welcome to the Neighborhood". He asked the board of directors to issue a statement
regarding the inaccuracy of the portrayal of the Circle C neighborhood by the television series. The
board of directors said they would discuss posting a reply on the website and/or newsletter, but
would not write a response to the local media. The board suggested that individual letters from
residents to the Austin Ainerican Statesman would have a bigger impact that sic] a board statement.
The Circle C Homeowners Association's mobilization of its own media technology of governance to
respond to newspaper accounts of a controversy surrounding a reality TV series was complicated
further by private contractual agreements, made by ABC with the participants in the series, which
prohibited the participants (but not the President of the Circle C Homeowners Association) from
talking with the press about the TV series. "Governing TV" has become, in this way, a matter of
governing, and extending a welcome mat to, the neighborhood. And this process occurs at the
intersection of TV's and the suburb's constitutions.
Welcome to the Neiiyhborhood was not only a demonstration and experiment in effective and wise
management of neighborhood, estate, real estate, household, family, and self, but it also became the
object of political demonstrations about what counts in these times as good citizenship and as fair,
reasonable, and wise government - in short, the civic virtues of liberalism. As an unsettled and

unsettling event, the TV program in government and citizenship enacted by Welcome to the
Nei~hborhood was a "citizenship test" that became a test in what counts as fair, reasonable, wise, and
good TV. This is a complicated process, since the failure of certain technologies of government may
affirm the usefulness and reliability of other governmental technologies. The "failure" of Welcome to
the Neighborhood's strategies and rules for staging "citizenship tests" became part of current TV's
experimentation with the rules of citizenship and the techniques of good government by various
private groups. Within this field of experimentation, even the failure of certain rules, strategies,
games, and tests are lessons to be acted upon.
The "failure" of Welcome to the Neighborhood had little to do with its having ventured too far afield
from TV's customary design of programs that are games as well as scientific experiments and
demonstrations. The impulse toward designing a TV program as social-scientific experiment runs
throughout the history of US TV," and in certain respects this tendency has deepened and broadened in
the current stage of television. The makeover programs discussed in Chapter 3, for instance,
frequently involve calculating improvement and progress through experiments involving subjects'
completion of tasks within the framework of a contest. These contests test and demonstrate the
subjects' limits and abilities to perform, improving their self-constitution through a set of guidelines
made available through TV as program/ regimen. However, Welcome to the Neighborhood's group
dynamic, its demonstration of how a private group manages and administers a "neighborhood"
(resolving differences, deciding the rights of various families/households, vetting what kind of
behavior is suitable to its neighborhood's constitution) set it apart slightly from makeover TV and
align it with numerous other veins of recent TV programming. Series such as MTV's The Real World
and Road Rules, NBC's The Apprentice, CBS's The Survivor, ABC's Wife Swap, Fox's Black/White,
Bravo's Top Chef and TLC's Town Haul have been not only some of the most successful recent TV
series, but they also share Welcome to the Neighborhood's experimentation with group governance with enacting provisional, privately administered constitutions. Collectively, these experiments and
games of group government have become integral to the idea and practice of "reinventing
government."
Games of Group Governance
In one respect, contemporary TV's preoccupation with demonstrations and techniques of private group
governance developed out of a paradox of the post-broadcast TV era, which conceived of maximum
representation of a national population as best accomplished through a proliferation of channels. The
trend toward maximizing representation and toward managing population differences occurred during
the early 1970s with series such as All in the Family, which weekly demonstrated the feebleness of
prior TV fashionings of neighborhood and household (and the dissolution of the idea of "family TV"
that had been an organizing principle among US broadcasters through the 1950s and 1960s). The
formation of a "public broadcasting" channel during the late 1960s and early 1970s also was
rationalized partly around a perceived need to represent more adequately a racial and gendered
diversity lacking in commercial broadcast TV. PBS's Sesame Street thus became one of the most
recognizable ways that public TV could achieve this, and in so doing represent the important civic
mission of TV. Since the 1970s, fashioning a pluralist TV thus became intertwined with the formation

of cable broadcasting. And in the post1970s period, televisual citizenship increasingly became an
objective and self-justification of new networks - Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Channel
(which became the Family Channel); Black Entertainment TV (as TV for African-Americans); Music
TV (as TV for youth); the Playboy Channel ("men's entertainment"); Lifetime, and Oxygen TV (as
"women's channels") all articulated lifestyle and values as a basis for televisual membership-cumcitizenship.
While we have selected Welcome to the Neighborhood as an example of a controversial and
relatively unsuccessful experiment in group governance - a selection made partly to underscore TV's
experimentalism in reinventing the mechanisms of group governance - there are ample (albeit varied)
examples of what counts in contemporary TV as successful group government. One would not need to
look further than Survivor (2000-present), one of the longest running (and by that standard, most
successful) prototypes of TV as experiment/demonstration in group governance. It would be
simplistic to attribute the reality-TV syndrome to the success of any one TV program as prototype, but
it is worth recognizing that Survivor's emergence as a model of successful TV production has
involved staging games of group constitution and group governance involving nonprofessional actorcontestants.
Considered as a game of teamwork and group governance, Survivor has been one of the most
recognizable and durable examples of demonstrating that good, active, and effective citizenship
(being a useful member of a team, and even upholding the team's reputation or honor) requires
maximum degrees of self-sufficiency - by the individual contestants and teams. The series
ritualistically tests the limits not only of contestants' stamina, resolve, and craft (or craftiness) in
completing certain prescribed tasks and surviving/winning, but also of individual players' and teams'
tolerance for those unable to carry their load, to be productive and responsible team-players, and to
be a good citizen. There are nevertheless certain paradoxes around which the series, as civic
laboratory, organizes its experiments in wise and effective government. The series plays upon the
tension between individual and collective interests, between the myth that premodern societies are
organized around an intense sense of "community" or Gemeinschaft (the series' reference to the teams
as "tribes") and the myth of a modern possessive individualism and self-interest (Gesellschaft),
between materialistic pursuits and a world lacking familiar material comforts and appliances (where
the need for comforting things is heightened), between a managerialist injunction to be a team player
(to pull together) and the relentless rewarding of the entrepreneurial capitalist and the Hobbesian
strategist, between the caricature of a premodern world as abiding by a natural "tribal law" and the
heroic caricature of modern societies as "governed" (guaranteeing freedom as the "natural condition"
of man), between a heightened state of insecurity (the jungle) and the promise of financial security for
the winner (returning home), and between the civilities and incivilities of participation, belonging,
and membership in privately formed groups. Particularly in these last two respects, Survivor enacts
(weekly and seasonally reenacts) the birth of government and the reinvention of new liberal citizen
players. Arguably, the absence of neighborhood and neighborliness - far away from the suburban
ideal of home - accentuates a need for provisional, seat-of-the pants constitution of group and
household.12 The lessons/ instructions of a "remote island" lacking remote controls (of the kind used
to operate TVs and TV households) are decidedly about how to govern through shifting and

provisional alliances and through exercises in caring for oneself (i.e., remotely and "at a distance").
Survivor's experiments in government and citizenship also developed out of US TV's post-1970s
preoccupation with representing and managing diversity as democratic comity. Not only are
Survivor's tests and tasks impelled and punctuated by periodic rounds of voting (more on this in
Chapter 6), but of voting members "off the island" who are unable to demonstrate their fitness to
remain actively involved in winning/ surviving as increasingly smaller groups. Each season begins
with a collection of team members (tribal citizens) who are selected by the series' producers often to
accentuate interaction between various populations, "values-subcultures," and lifestyle clusters. By
the end of each season, however, the problem of governing fairly is put to tests over sheer selfinterest and self-reliance, as the group and its managers narrow and become increasingly incapable of
being fair. In this respect, the most fundamental game of the series is about testing/ contesting the
limits of democratic comity in an environment where difference increasingly matters. And even
though this game is cast as an exercise/ experiment in group behavior and group governance, the
series rewards a "survivor" - the most self-actualized citizen player.
As both experiment and game (a test in both senses) that winnows the useful or successful participants
from those who are not, Survivor perpetuates a paradox about the democratic aspiration of its group
governance, and about TV as technology of liberal, democratic government and citizenship. How can
the series' enactment of group governance be about equality (mutual decisions) if it also is about
selecting who's in and who's out (who is the fittest, and thus who represents the most successful and
model-citizen/player)?13 In the current regime of TV series about group governance, the long
groupprocess of selecting and recognizing a winner (who's in and who's out) is a practice of
demonstrating that there are certain kinds of citizens who are more fit than others to become the kind
of citizen that the series' games are training. Even though the process involves a game of gradual
exclusion, what remains is the fittest - the example par excellence of self-reliant citizenship. This
does not necessarily mean that the winner is liked (as was evident with the public ambivalence about
Richard Hatch in the first season of Survivor), but the winner still warrants admiration as an
exemplar of effective self-actualization and group brokering.
Although The Apprentice perpetuated many of the features of Survivor (in part because of Mark
Burnett's involvement as producer of both series), The Apprentice offered a different game of group
governance in several important respects. First, and most obviously, The Apprentice converts the
Darwinian rationale about fitness, adaptation, and "natural selection" in Survivor's jungle/paradise to
a stage/lab that is unabashedly commercial. Rather than introducing commodities as occasional
rewards for contestants competing in a wilderness supposedly untouched by commercial signage (as
is customary on Survivor), The Apprentice's very fiber (its games, tasks, setting) is about profiting
from commercial signage.
At the center of the series (as judge, boss, manager, series-owner, and exemplar) is Donald Trump,
which the series casts as arguably the most recognizable US entrepreneur and mogul of the late
twentieth century. Before the series began, Trump was a relatively successful real-estate investor and
developer, owner of casinos, resorts, and country clubs, and author of several bestselling books on
investment advice, money management, and strategies of financial success. In the series' 2004

premiere, Trump describes himself as a self-made billionaire, summarizing the erosion and
subsequent expansion of his fortune over the 1990s, and associating his personal financial prowess
and successes with a national economic recovery between 1999 and 2004 (a period coterminous with
the current reality-TV syndrome). While Trump's personal narrative in the series' premiere omitted
references to his being the son of a wealthy investor and his attendance at one of the nation's most
elite business schools, Wharton Business College, Trump and the series repeatedly invoke his
personal successes, status, and authority (as author of books about personal financial successstrategy)
in order to rationalize the series as games of and rewards for self-actualization. These games and
rewards demonstrate that any player supposedly has a chance to become successful playing by his
techniques and the series' rules.
While (like Survivor) The Apprentice is organized as a game with nonprofessional actors, the series
casts the game as a learning experience and casts the contestants (players and peformers in the
business sense) as there to learn - to prove that they possess qualities which Trump would want and
will reward. In this respect, the series is not only a vehicle for displaying Trump's business ventures
and brands, but a lab for teaching/producing/inventing an ideal corporate citizen. In this sense, the
series is an extension of Trump's books: exercises for the contestants and the viewers interested in
cultivating the skills necessary to be self-actualizing, self-disciplined, and energetic makers of their
own fortunes and financial futures. After the first season of the series, some courses in US business
schools were using episodes of The Apprentice to teach management skills. And after the second
season, Trump developed Trump University, an online curriculum in business strategies and
management techniques. The Apprentice, however, is populist pedagogy - free, though not
commercial-free, for anyone to watch.
Like Welcome to the Neighborhood and Survivor, The Apprentice is a behavioral experiment. The
series'/game's design also links its exercises in self-help through investment and management skills to
a kind of citizenship and government modeled after and involving management models in corporate
organizations. In each season of The Apprentice, contestants are chosen to represent geographic,
racial, and gendered diversity; in the premiere episode, Trump declared that he intended to pit male
contestants against female contestants to determine whether there really is a "glass ceiling" in US
corporate management culture - an experiment within an experiment. However, contestants also are
selected because of their fledgling business experience (many have started their own companies,
though some have only an MBA from prestigious business schools). The contestants vie for a chance
to work for Donald Trump for a year by demonstrating on a weekly basis their abilities to manage a
group (as a "group leader") that is charged with accomplishing certain business tasks (e.g., selling
lemonade, attracting customers to a Planet Hollywood restaurant, designing and markettesting a toy
for Mattel, running a charity event at one of Trump's country clubs and casinos). As in Survivor, the
series tests these young corporate players'-citizens' ability to navigate a paradox: to fend for
themselves (to be self-actualizing entrepreneurs and effective "leaders") while exhibiting their ability
to be trustworthy workers and team players. Good (corporate) citizenship within current liberalism's
mantra of reinventing government requires not only citizens who are players but players who are
competent in both these respects. And the game played by The Apprentice enacts this paradox as a
natural and fundamental tenet of US corporate management's recent emphasis upon "leadership

training" (as part of the curriculum of privately sponsored, corporate training as well as of higher
education). In a state where good government is less government, then everyone needs to be a leader
rather than a dependent/onlooker, though clearly, the game's objective is also to underscore that only
one player can be selected to lead the other corporate citizens. Aside from this paradox, The
Apprentice affirms the trend toward structuring the workplace around small groups (one example of
which is the organizational model of "communities of practice" in corporations), and the series
experiments with extending this model of corporate small-group management and productivity beyond
the workplace, as when the program tests and has surveillance over the contestant-employees who
extend their teamwork back into their apartments, where government by the group continues. 4

Illustration 5.1 The tribal council on Survivor and the boardroom on The Apprentice enact the rules
and rituals of private governance (The Apprentice: Mark Burnett Productions and Donald Trump
Productions LLC for NBC TV; Survivor: Mark Burnett Productions for CBS, 2004)
That all of the contestants are young (20s through niid-30s) in the first few seasons of The Apprentice
attests to several implications that have been suggested above but that need to be elaborated briefly.
First, casting the corporate citizen-leader as youthful reinforces The Apprentice's premise that the

game is training. Even when contestants lose, their closing confessions to the TV audience frequently
refer to the important lessons that they have learned from the experience in the game.15 Losing can be
the path to winning if one is selfactualizing. Second, the series represents a population and lifestyle
cluster (young entrepreneurial professionals) which are most affected by the current political
rationality's expectation that citizens manage their own financial futures.16 There is little about The
Apprentice that understands social welfare in any terms except taking personal responsibility. The
premiere episode begins with the song, "Money, Money, Money," whose lyrics invoke the
Depression-era phrase, "Buddy, can you spare a dime?" Financial risk and securing one's financial
future is central to the game played by young contestants on The Apprentice.
In addition to repurposing Survivor's behavioral experimentation with group governance, and
Survivor's citizenship tests, The Apprentice also "advances" the kind of games played in reality TV
for youth. In one respect, The Apprentice is a slightly more grownup version of some of the most
recognized and formative youth-oriented experiments/ games in group-governance (e.g., MTV's The
Real World and Road Rules, and BET's College Hill). The Apprentice arguably makes sense - is a
rational progression - in part because its contestants, and many of its viewers, are a population that
has grown up in a TV regimen anchored in part by these programs. The Real World (which premiered
in 1992) and Road Rules (which premiered in 1995) are two of the forerunners of the current vein of
reality TV. MTV was the first channel in the United States (and the world) designed primarily for
young audiences, and both series were integral to MTV's transformation away from predominantly
musicvideo programming during the 1980s to lifestyle programming during the 1990s. Historically,
the success of these programs intersected with the discourse about "reinventing government" that this
book addresses.
Unlike older TV soap opera, these programs emphasized the provisional constitution of household.
Because all of the cast are out of high school but not exactly beyond the normal age of a college
student, the series belong to a history of youth fiction as (and about) rites of passage - of recognizing
and assuming "adult" responsibilities. The Real World has formulated its lessons from a provisional
home, for a population that (by US standards) is usually between the homes of their parents and living
"on their own." Road Rules has formulated its lessons "on the road" - from a mobile home and within
a ritual of youth of this age involving going abroad to learn lessons of responsibility. BET's College
Hill is set more within dormitory life on a college campus.
While the two MTV series have increasingly involved games and tasks (as part of the trend in the
current regime of reality TV toward practicing and exercising abilities and responsibilities), the MTV
series always have been behavioral experiments in private group governance by non-actors. In these
series, becoming a mature citizen involves learning how to act and perform - not simply as training to
become a Hollywood actor but a good performer of citizenship from the home or on the road, a
competent social actor/agent as group leader and member.
Since their first seasons, the provisional status of the households in The Real World and Road Rules
are about managing diversity. One thing that makes these households provisional (and certainly a
hallmark of these series) is their representation of gendered, class, racial, and geographic diversity "multiculturalism" for a lifestyle channel. As in the series already discussed in this section, the MTV

and BET series are demonstrations/exercises that lead ordinary young people to realize their relation
to the rules (house rules and road rules) for getting along with difference. In this respect, the series
stage carefully designed experiments in achieving democratic comity, for a population of citizens
whose recent eligibility to vote (to be a political citizen in that sense) is intertwined with their
eligibility (according to the State) to have sex, to drink alcohol, to drive, to have an abortion without
their parents' consent, or to serve in the military. While the series enact scenes of membership,
belonging, and association, they do so as informal (and for these young, non-trained actors) relatively
unpracticed forms of group decision-making, caring, and leadership. In this respect, they reformulate
a long history of educational films for youth about becoming good citizens, except that these TV series
are not part of an academic curriculum (i.e., are watched whenever its young audience is away from
school and wherever its audience provisionally calls home).
As a form of civic education and exercise, these TV programs' emphasis upon youthful subjects
converge with other series. In 2005, Mark Burnett teamed with Sylvester Stallone to produce NBC's
The Contender, a variation of the game-experiment wherein amateur male boxers who were selected
from across the United States underwent a period of training and then a series of individual bouts
between two teams of fighters. The Contender interweaves a regimen of selfactualization with
exercises in group management. Furthermore, it also emphasizes the racial diversity of the
contestants, and their generally blue-collar backgrounds, in making training about citizenship a sport."
Bravo's Top Chef (which premiered in 2006) is the most recent of relatively successful reality TV
series organized around professional cooking (following The Restaurant in 2004, and the Food
Channel's programming about contests among professional chefs). Like the reality TV programs of
self-care, Top Chef rewards a form of entrepreneurial- isni: a young chef who most impresses a panel
of experienced and often famous chefs is rewarded, not simply with money but with financial and
other resources for starting her/his own restaurant. However, like The Apprentice and The Contender,
Top Cliff is also a set of lessons, exercises, and tests in managing a kitchen, where young contestants
(with experience as chef-helpers) must work with less supervision while demonstrating their promise
as wise and effective leaders of kitchen help. Paradoxically, demonstrating leadership in the kitchen
can only be imagined through demonstrations of young contestants' individual work and talents for
assembling ingredients, management of time, and attractive presentation. The contestants aspire
toward and work as if they were in charge of a collectivity of kitchen help. Because Top Chef's
primary performance stage and laboratory is the kitchen rather than the sites of corporate management
typical of The Apprentice, and because Top Cliff emphasizes individual artistry and technique as a
prerequisite for successful group governance, it affirms that good government is as much an art as a
highly technical science.
The TV series we've looked at so far are enacted as tests of group governance, democratic procedure,
and citizenship - tests that combine games by citizen-players (contestants actively competing and
striving to win and to reap rewards) and social experiments that test the limits of individual and team
endurance, the depth of individual and group resolve, the ability of groups to resolve differences and
to act fairly. The game dimension of these series is slightly more pronounced than their scientific
dimension as social and behavioral experiments. On series such as ABC's Wife Swap and Fox's
Black/White, however, group government is conducted as a social experiment. These series

acknowledge (even accentuate) the seriousness, rather than the play, of managing difference and
negotiating their role and responsibilities as citizen-subjects in multicultural association. Unlike the
citizen-games that involve vetting who's in and who's out, these series recognize alternative lifestyle,
difference, and plurality as conditions (even an objective) of contemporary forms of liberal
government and citizenship. In that respect, they are about the limits of inclusivity, about the ability of
subjects to tolerate the discomforts of living difference and sharing the same space with alternative
lifestyles, and about the capacity of subjects to adjust their familiar management solutions to the
requirements of the alternative lifestyle.

Illustration 5.2 The household is a site of governance on Wife Swap (RDF Media for ABC TV, 2005)
Both Wife Swap and Black/White temporarily move subjects into environments that test their ethics
and their commitment to a certain lifestyle. The household as stage or lab for these TV experiments
not only exposes a set of privately held and lived values but does so within a sphere of family
management. As in The Real World, the subjects' temporary household becomes, in its unfamiliarity,
a stage/set for testing one's accepted practices and lived principles of running a household. The new,
temporary arrangement requires testing and modifying one's constitution - the rules of life and order at
home, the regimens that have made a house a "home."
Wife Swap, as its title suggests, routinely organizes its tests around two wives (invariably mothers)
who trade households with one another. Each broadcast also follows a certain sequence: the
introduction of the wives and their distinctive, contrasting habits/rules of household management, the
introduction of the wives to their temporary households and families, the effort by the wives to size up
and adjust to the governmental rationality of their temporary households, the wives' implementation
(often imposition) of a new set of rules for managing various problems perceived by the wives in
their temporary households, a period of adjustment, deliberation, and reconciliation in the temporary
households, and finally, the return of the wives to their more permanent households - a reunion in

which the wives and family members discuss what they have learned from the experiment. Not only
does the series examine how subjects adjust to differences, but this adjustment involves learning (and
demonstrating to the viewers) paths and techniques of household management. Some of the differences
in the first two seasons of Wfe Swap included a peace activist who opposed the war in Iraq and who
trades places with a military-trained mom who supported the war in Iraq; a woman who was unable
to control her credit-card expenditures who trades places with a mother who rigorously/fanatically
managed the household finances; a devoutly Catholic, Italian-American mother of a meticulously kept
household who trades places with a Caucasian woman who was married to an African-American
male artist and who apparently devoted little effort to household upkeep; an upper-crust mom who
was supported by her husband, left the children and household to the care of paid help, and trades
places with a working-class mom whose daily duties involved more strenuous labor than her
husband's.
In Wife Swap's experiments and demonstrations about women as domestic managers, the series
requires its subjects to develop sets of personally constituted rules (homemade constitutions) and to
experiment with the efficacy of their management techniques and skills in the alternative households.
In the central part of each episode, the female subjects/managers learn the rules of the host (or
project) household and then formalize and impose their own rules. ABC's official web site for the
series also prominently displays each woman's rules and "manual." The online manual (which further
formalizes the woman's guidelines as a personal constitution) thus serves as a way of representing
each woman as citizen and as governess. As citizen, she is a foreign member of a household whose
rights she must declare and defend, and as governess she is a house manager - not legally a housewife
- who must solve problems accentuated by her presence as foreigner, temporary citizen, and guest
worker. Like the ritualized sequence of steps taken by the women in the broadcast program, the online
manual and rules-statement for each woman formalizes a template for what each woman believes are
her codes, rights, and responsibilities. (So in this sense, ABC constitutes the coda - as "manual" - by
which the women declare their personal constitutions.) Each online manual invariably includes each
woman's guidelines for household chores, kid management, kitchen management, shopping, a weekly
routine, weekend routine, leisure and social life, relationship with her partner, relationship with her
family, relationship with her pet(-s), and (lastly) finances. The moral economy of the household is
thus codified as a set of formal prescriptions and declarations - much like (but mattering differently
from) a legal contract or constitution.18
Similar to many of the series discussed in this section (and in contrast to many of the series discussed
in prior chapters), Wife Swap conducts an experiment in self-actualization without a guide, coach, or
mentor. Series such as The Apprentice, Survivor, The Contender, and Top Chef are programs in
which group governance is "overseen" by a judge who makes and imposes rules, though usually after
the group has made their own decisions. Wife Swap presumes and recognizes a woman's technical
abilities to manage households, even as it puts in play the ethics of management, and even as it affirms
that there is no longer a uniform morality or set of rules, no standard moral economy, of the US
household. Constituting a plurality of moral economies is, after all, a central preoccupation of a TV
network such as ABC, which tries to address a relatively diverse audience - an aggregation of
lifestyle clusters and "values subcultures." A program that formalizes manuals and guidelines (as

homemade constitutions) is one way for ABC to solve that problem.

Black/White's experiment in liberal and democratic government involves literally shaping (physically
reconstructing) subjects to heighten their sensitivity to and their reflection about racial difference and
the requirements of citizenship in a multiracial society.19 To demonstrate these requirements, the
program tests its subjects' (in-)tolerance of racial difference by converting their racial identities.
Three Caucasian and three African-American subjects undergo a makeover so that they can "pass" in
various locations and can experience what it feels like to have a different racial identity.2' As in Wife
Swap, they are made to feel temporary citizens in alien territory, having to learn and navigate the
rules, codes, and laws of their membership in a free and open society. Like makeover TV, the
program followed a process of ethical training and self-actualization through the acquisition of new
techniques and technologies. This process occurred through steps taken by each subject and family
group to state their civic rights in alien territories (places where they, as racially hybrid subjects, felt
uncomfortable going and performing certain tasks). Unlike other makeover TV, however, physical
transformation in Black/White is temporary. The series may be, secondarily, about putting these
subjects (and viewers) on a path to a life lived in greater harmony and understanding toward another
race; however, in the last episode of the six-episode series the two patriarchs agree to disagree about
whether the other harbors racist attitudes. In this respect, the program is less about training than about
observing and testing the behavior, reactions, and tolerance of subjects before they presumably retreat
to households and neighborhoods where their membership is more readily validated every day.
We include Black/White as part of a discussion of group governance because the subjects are
expected to constitute, cohabit within, and collectively manage a mixed-race household, which is
located (as one of the cast points out) in a multiracial suburb. In this household, they appear out of
their racialized costumes and are continually judged and coached by members of the other family
about their peformauce as representatives of a black or white population.' In scenes staged at their
collective home, they are not presented doing housework together; instead household management is
overtly a process of hammering out how each one is supposed to act and behave - at or away from
home. Aside from these displays of group governance at home, the subjects' staged involvement away
from home involves situations where each character participates in forms of collective decisionmaking: each family (in costume) participates in racially homogeneous focus groups, the son in the
African-American family participates (in costume) in an etiquette class comprising white students,
and the daughter of the Caucasian family participates (in costume) in a drama class consisting of
African-American students who collectively judge each other's performances.

Illustration 5.3 Two families "swap" races on the TV experiment Black/White (20th Century-Fox
Productions for F/X, 2006)
In Black/White, the process for achieving pluralism and racial equality (central to democratic
government/citizenship) thus is made to run through commercial and cultural spheres which are just as
much about differentiating and rewarding good performances of race and racial citizenship as they are
about constituting an environment - public and private worlds - where different races can live
together and participate as equals. As noted above, a paradox of democratic participation in the
current regime of reality TV is that the path to pluralism is through nongovernmental (private,
everyday) spheres where one's performance as a member is assessed, and thus where pluralism turns
on who's in and who's out. That Black/White represents focus groups as one of the natural sites where
group decision-making occurs attests to how naturalized and rational this process is within reality
TV's mode of producing citizens and staging exhibitions of democracy in action.
Two other programs, TLC's Town Haul and Bravo's Real Housewives of Orange County, link our
initial analysis of Welcome to the Neighborhood to this section's discussion of group governance and
reality TV's paradox of democratic participation. Town Haul (2005-6) shares many of the
conventions of makeover TV. Its host and lead expert is Genevieve Gorder, an interior decorator and
a host of another TLC series, Trading Spaces. In Town Haul, the "overhaul" is not of a car, house, or
football field, but of a small town - or certain sites whose collective improvement is supposed to
improve the town. As in Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, the program's producers arrive with
specialists to assist in projects, but the producers also actively involve the town's population in
accomplishing the various renovations. Each broadcast follows the citizens' participation in remaking
their town. Town Haul is therefore similar to programs discussed in Chapter 1 that provide a form of
welfare assistance through private initiatives and contractors arranged by TV - granting wishes and
offering aid to several families in the town as part of the town's improvement. As a program on the
Learning Channel, Town Haul also intersects with the programs discussed in Chapter 2 that are about

teaching citizenship and shaping citizens through demonstrations about self-fashioning and care of
oneself.
In both these respects, the program is integral to the discourse of "reinventing government," although
(as the program's web site makes explicit) civic action is merely catalyzed by TV experts and
professionals; the work and energy comes from citizens-cum-"neighbors": Town Haul "is an inspiring
look at the power of neighbors to connect and create positive changes in the world around them." And
as Gorder states:
I've always wanted to do a show with people that needed more than just some paint on their walls.
TLC has given me this remarkable opportunity to actually move into some of America's most
intriguing small towns, and help orchestrate a physical and emotional renovation. I really think this
series is going to redefine the meaning of what it means to be a good neighbor.
While other programs may select and then demonstrate the capacity of individual citizens and families
to help themselves, Town Haul is slightly more ambitious - helping individual families rebuild
individual sites that, with the input of "neighbors," gradually and collectively reshape the town.
The program's emphasis upon small towns is significant in several respects. One is that the small
town becomes a manageable scale for demonstrating the potential consequences of group and
grassroots involvement (although "the people" are selected and guided by TV professionals/experts).
Also, a "town haul" easily represents a scale of civic action that is imaginable for suburban gated
communities or urban gentrifiers who have moved recently to residential developments whose design
seeks to re-create a bygone sense of "neighborhood" and "community."" Neighborhood and
community (the idealization of small-town life in urban and suburban development) also are
articulated in Touar Haul with displays of civic pride. That the producers of Town Haul describe
their project as empowering neighbors to "connect and create positive changes in the world around
them" assumes that the program's outcomes represent an improvement (a "positive change"), and
simply on the basis of mobilizing neighbors to "take back" the town, to make the town more
neighborly and thus more able to galvanize civic pride.
The program's selection of the particular towns is also significant. Just as individuals and families are
selected in many of the other programs discussed in this book, Towu Haul's producers select a town
worthy of being made over. In its first three seasons, Town Haul was set in Jeffersonville, NY,
Laurens, SC, and Washington, MO, and these towns were selected (according to a Chamber of
Commerce bulletin regarding the latter town) from fifty other locations. All of these towns have
relatively modest income levels (with average household incomes ranging between $29,000 and
$48,000) and thus are suitably "in need" of assistance. However, two of the towns (Jeffersonville and
Washington) were already engaged in initiatives to promote themselves as historically important, as
tourist destinations, and as cultural/arts centers.23 The official web site for Washington, MO
provides links to the Downtown Washington, Inc. - A Missouri Main Street Community, where
donations are accepted to rebuild its waterfront and farmer's market. The program's web site and the
town's web site both note that the town was a stop on the Lewis and Clark Expedition and has no
fewer than four Nationally Registered Historic Districts. The program's improvements, therefore, are

not only about putting the town on the national map (a group exercise in civic pride) but assisting
(through private aid and grassroots action) the town's designation as historically important and
valuable. Furthermore, the program's makeover both assists and capitalizes upon the efforts of the
town's government, Chamber of Commerce, historical society, and volunteer associations - each
catalyzing the other. In this respect, selecting which families/sites are improved is a form of group
governance (or more accurately, public-private partnerships) occurring between citizens, local
government, local booster institutions, and national TV. Selecting appropriate towns and citizens is
itself a process that involves already active efforts to promote and make over the town - a process
that makes Town Haul instrumental to the reinvention of local governments, and an active local
citizenry instrumental to TV as public assistance.
The selection of these small, needy-but-energized towns are also convenient yet vivid sites of a form
of community and group initiative galvanized through TV because of the towns' relation to Red States
and Blue States - to a map of a political rationality that has emerged during the first decade of the
twenty-first century. Without making a claim about the political orientation of these towns, and
without affirming that the category of the Red State explains the town, the selection of small towns
does tap into (in these times) a political rationality as national map that associates small towns
(particularly in the South, Midwest, and Rocky Mountains) with a neoconservative reasoning about
the role of liberal government. It is worth noting that two of the three towns chosen to be "overhauled"
in the first three seasons (Jeffersonville and Washington) are between 97 and 98 percent white. This
demographic feature makes them convenient settings for an idyllic re-creation of a national past, and
it makes Town Haul's demonstration of group mobilization (particularly the civic action implied by
old-fashioned "town hall" meetings) tantamount to eliding racial difference in the town's
reconstitution. The series has yet to include scenes of group deliberations by the towns (in the fashion
of town-hall meetings), and relies instead on displays of ad hoc group support - of neighbors
recognizing the need to help one another in an initiative in which the supporters and supported have
been preselected.
This synergy between the current stage of broadcast TV and the enterprise of local government returns
our discussion to why the Welcome to the Neighborhood experiment matters. By considering Town
Haul and Welcome to the Neighborhood together, another paradox of a neoliberal practice of
democracy through TV is that the "town hall" has been reinvented as "neighborhood association" or
"community association" - a private legislative body that administers privately designed constitutions
(rules) for groups that have been vetted by the association and that have been the target of marketing
efforts to fashion a particular kind of neighborhood as "lifestyle cluster" and "values subculture".
Bravo's Real Housewives of Orange County is a documentary-styled serial about the private lives of
women in Orange County's Coto de Caza gated community. Although this residential development's
average income per household ($137,000) makes its lifestyle the antithesis of the towns in Town
Haul, it too is predominately (90 percent) white, roughly the same number of residents as the towns in
Town Haul, and just as invested in the idea of neighborhood and community. The residential
development's online source of news about itself, for instance, is the "Coto de Caza Community
Association Neighborhood News." Orange County is also widely recognized as a bastion of a
neoliberal (if not rural neoconservative) political rationality. Real Housewives of Orange County's

first season (2006) was largely bereft of scenes of Coto de Caza's rules and regulating authorities.
The rules are made in and from households, and the program plays (sometimes with great irony) on
the female subjects' and protagonists' group encounters (at local leisure locations). These subjects'
lack of apparent commitment to local government and civic activism is, in part, what is at stake in
representing their everyday lives and alliances.
It is worth recognizing that, as residents and citizens of a gated community (the real backdrop of these
Real Housewives of Orange County), the subjects of the program are also subjects of an elaborate set
of rules and administrative bodies that regulate their forms of association (including, presumably, the
staging of a TV series there). Aside from the Community Association, which has an elected board of
trustees, Coto de Caza is governed by various committees (e.g., an Architectural Committee and
Beautification Committee). These administrative bodies formalize and enforce rules and bestow
awards for various aspects of daily life there: reporting vandalism, timely removal of trashcans from
curbsides, parking, safety, best holiday decorations, and dues and penalties paid to the Association.
To consider TV as experiments, games, and demonstrations of neighborhood constitutions and group
governance thus involves considering how the means of democratic deliberation and participation are
an enabling condition of TV series such as Real Housewives of Orange County, Welcome to the
Neighborhood, and Town Haul - the subject of Chapter 6.

Chapter 6

Playing TV's Democracy Game

In Couveigeaue Culture, Henry Jenkins contends that the recent "collisions" between old and new
media, and among new media, are to be welcomed because they afford new opportunities and forms
of participation.' An old "consumerist" medium such as TV, he contends, can be redeemed through the
interactivity of viewers/players. Jenkins advocates what he calls a "politics of participation" which
"starts from the assumption that we may have greater collective bargaining power if we form
consumption communities."' Although Jenkins devotes a chapter to cataloging various commercial tieins between advertisers and TV series such as Americana Idol, he also concludes that undue emphasis
on the economics of media concentration accompanying convergence fails to recognize that "a
participatory media culture is worth fighting for."3 Jenkins's analysis is pitched between the familiar
antinomies - such as corporate power vs. consumer activism - that have guided not only media
criticism, but also many campaigns for media reform.
Using somewhat different key concepts, but still affirming many of the premises guiding Jenkins's
project, John Hartley has proposed that contemporary TV should be taken seriously by cultural
critics, even as a critical engagement with TV requires critics to recognize the enormous popular
appeals and pleasures afforded by popular entertainment as "everyday education."4 Hartley is
particularly fond of the trend toward what he calls "do-it-yourself' TV, whose appeal is the
empowerment of viewers to express and choose for themselves, and their freedom to explore and recreate alternative cultural identities through TV. As he states, "In a period of consumer choice,
computer-aided interactivity and post-identity politics, semiotic self-determination [the construction
of one's own identity and community through TV] is emerging as a right."' For Hartley, this
development is nothing short of a new kind of citizenship that viewers form not with the State or
"traditional" kinds of community but with media such as TV - a cultural citizenship that he lauds as
Do-It-Yourself Citizenship. One of his primary examples of a DIY citizenship is the role that
programs on the Nickelodeon channel play in freeing teenage girls to re-create their identities.
Examples such as this signal to Hartley the "emancipation" of TV's full cultural and political potential
as a communication medium for "independent, autonomous, modes of human interaction unbrokered
by control agencies.i'
This chapter is partly an effort to consider the paradoxes of an emancipated, self-creating media
citizen and a "participatory media culture," and to ask a different set of questions about media power
and consumers' agency, in order to imagine an alternative path to political reform through media
citizenship and to acknowledge what is difficult about this path. In certain respects, the culture and
politics of participation that Jenkins and Hartley envisage being brought to bear on TV are decidedly
democratic - predicated upon the "social contract between participants,"' or upon a "contract between
viewers and media communities,"' and driven by consumers and fans who, by building imaginary
communities, "learn to govern themselves."9 For Jenkins and Hartley, the value of the private
contract, self-creation, freedom, and self-governance - such as the meaning and performance of
democracy - is mostly self-evident. As we have shown, private contracts, self-fashioning, exercising
freedom, and self-governance are invoked as justifications and objectives for current initiatives to
"advance" liberal government through public-private partnerships and a greater self-

responsibilization of citizens; TV in particular is being made over and reinvented to make it more
useful within this rationality about an active, self-possessive, and entrepreneurial citizenry. Also, as
suggested in Chapter 5, TV's current emphasis upon ordinary people playing games of citizenship and
group governance, enacting and testing privately designed rules, pacts, and constitutions, makes it
necessary to avoid generalized valorizations of democracy as a goal and to recognize instead what is
complicated about TV's current mattering as a democratic form and practice. While Jenkins and
Hartley's emphasis on the liberating possibilities of contemporary media seeks to counter the view the
TV is undemocratic, they fail to acknowledge how the personal or collective freedoms of media
interactivity involve a form of selfgovernment (the government of the se !l) that is authorized by a
current reasoning about citizenship and civic participation. The active (or "interactive") citizen is an
objective of current efforts to reinvent liberal government. Rather than resolving this question by
arguing one side or the other, or arguing for a middle ground, it is necessary to rethink the premises
upon which this question often is posed, considering why it is such a persistent reasoning about TV
and media power and suggesting an alternative set of questions suited to the current "neoliberal"
reasoning about self-government and the government of the self
First, the question of whether TV enhances or erodes democracy often tends to treat democracy as a
universally recognized ideal and a moral good (what Jeffrey Minson has called a "romantic
Republicanism") that can be achieved best under certain conditions - in some nations rather than
others. Or it tends to idealize democracy as something that always will produce the same benefit - do
the same good - everywhere."' Too often, the question of whether TV enhances or diminishes
democracy assumes that democracy can be abstracted, not just from specific arrangements for
governing (interdependent institutions, constitutions, and programs) but also from an experimentalism
- the ongoing failures, contingencies, and provisional achievement of democracy.
With these considerations in mind, our project does not assume that there is an authentic form of
democracy that TV has veiled or perverted as spectacle. The view that TV is a spectacle of
democracy is often cast nostalgically, as if TV has degraded a pre-mass media democracy or fostered
the disappearance of a "public sphere." Or recent TV is thought to have spoiled a democratic
potential associated with early broadcast TV, resulting in the fall of a heroic age of broadcast
journalists such as Edward Murrow and in the rise of a "sound-bite journalism," The Daily Show, or
the inanity of Reality TV. Against this view, Hartley argues that TV's current incarnation, and its
legacy for the future, might best be described as "democratainment" - a term that he does not use
pejoratively to describe the new "emancipated" potential of Do-It-Yourself TV." It is incumbent on
anyone interested in understanding TV's relation to "states of democracy" to recognize that democracy
is not simply a universal ideal but material and technical procedures. As such, democracy is always a
provisional achievement, involving on-going failures and break-downs and whose technical
procedures provisionally allow citizens to govern themselves actively and responsibly. Democracy
as "self-government" is thus reliant upon the technical procedures, such as the ones that we have
discussed that mediate the government of the self. From this starting point, we can begin to figure out
how televisual techniques and technologies become instrumental within the arrangement, experiments,
and rationalities of government, and particularly how these technical procedures and rationalities of
government support particular democratic states and their constitutions - even as these techniques are

continually modified and replaced. Examining these technical and programmatic procedures allows
us to understand better how participation and citizenship/ membership are rationalized as being "fair"
- and how the replacement of techniques is rationalized as "improving upon" or "advancing" the
fairness of earlier processes.
Because each of us lives our life through various governmentalities constituted around particular
forms and guidelines of participation, membership, and association, it also is necessary to develop an
analysis that recognizes the multiple and diverse - sometimes interdependent and sometimes
competing - technical procedures of democracy.' From this perspective, TV is only one of many ways
that participation and association are constituted and rationalized, even though TV has been
reinvented to accommodate and sometimes link multiple forms of participation and association.
Consequently, there currently are multiple constitutions/rationalities of TV - multiple ways of
enacting and testing group governance. The proliferation of cable networks and its lifestyle-clusters,
as well as TV's intersection with the Web, has multiplied TV's constitutions and the guidelines suited
for particular forms of participation and association. This development also has cast the consumercitizen as actively ("interactively") involved in the process. By focusing on the ongoing invention of
procedures for participation, TV can be studied for its capacity to "advance" or "reinvent"
democracy. And when anyone points now to the United States as a state of "self-government" and
"advanced democracy," this (and the televisual experiments considered in this book) must be in part
what they mean and have to grapple with. So rather than asking whether these developments have
made TV more democratic, it is necessary to ask how TV has been redesigned to accommodate more
techniques of self-government and more forms of the democracy game, and how that development has
been useful to a discourse and reasoning about the present as being "more democratic" than before.
The trend toward customizing participation around lifestyle clusters has occurred not only through
efforts by TV networks to tie TV watching and consumption to more or less formalized
"memberships," but also through expanding and accounting for membership that involves particular
technologies of participation (e.g., Home Shopping Network membership, Turner Classic Movie
membership, or Pat Robertson's Family Channel's solicitation of members and money to its TV
congregation). The proliferation of these rules and technologies of membership establish the specific
benefits and forms of empowerment which accrue from membership. It is this trend that distinguishes
contemporary TV from a rationality in the 1950s about democracy and broadcasting - about a form of
TV that represented or addressed the nation.
TV's diversification and emphasis on choice paradoxically have contributed to an arrangement for
insulating from diversity - from those who have limited access to a specific network's membership.
As we have seen, reality TV's experiments and games of citizenship often are tests about the rules for
playing (and playing fairly), particularly with respect to inclusivity and the problem of rights for all.
And so they too are everyday ways of vetting and rationalizing who gets to be a member and
participate. However, their contestants already share (have been selected by producers to share) an
aspiration to a specific enterprise, community, or neighborhood of belonging.
Too often the debates about TV as a democratic or undemocratic medium fail to acknowledge the
paradoxes of participation, agency, empowerment, and fairness through which TV is made to

matter.13 Certainly being able to participate in a democratic process requires membership or

citizenship - that participants be of good standing and recognize (are willing to "play" by) the rules of
the game. Reality TV series' experiments and games in group governance, as tests of alliances and
alliance-building, help rationalize a broader investment by contemporary TV in membership as a
requisite for democratic participation.
From these perspectives, democratization does not pertain now (nor ever) merely to the formal
procedures of political agency (voting for political candidates and referenda). It also pertains to
various spheres and techniques of life management - and in the current regime of TV, to "lifestyle
management." The formation of "good citizens" through "good TV" involves an ongoing process of a
testing and improvement/advancement, of both contestants and viewers, that makes it impossible ever
to generalize about democracy or about TV as democratic or undemocratic. Instead, one needs first to
figure out how various ways of rationalizing participation and membership matter with respect to the
formal and informal, public, private, and personal workings of government. The question should be,
what is it that governmental rationalities ask or require of particular members in order to perform
democracies? As Raymond Williams noted, "No questions are more difficult than those of democracy
.... [and that] analysis of variation will not resolve them, though it may sometimes clarify them."14
And as Gregor McLennan has added, "there is considerable contestation over democracy's content
and value ... partly because each process of democratization serves to highlight (new) issues about
what exactly more and better democracy involves, and (changing) issues about the proper subject,
scope, and depth of political `self determination.i15 Democracy is not, in other words, another
instance of false consciousness formed through TV as political/ ideological spectacle; it is an
achievement that - for better or worse - occurs through specific techniques, experiments, and
demonstrations with which members and citizens "enter into their own government" (forms of selfgovernment, and government of the self). But this does not make the objective of analysis to prove
(one more time) that TV masks an authentic kind of democracy, nor that the proliferation of TV
channels and their forms of interactivity have resulted in a more democratic form of TV. The question
is less how has TV failed or succeeded as a type of mass democracy than how is a "mass democracy"
made rational and technically conducted in these times, when the injunction for a kind of TV that is
"of, by, and for the people" occurs through the pluralization and mass customization of "popular"
constitutions, and through experiments that are as much about failure and setbacks as about
provisional successes.
TV and the Technology of Counting
To consider democracy as a technical achievement that is predicated upon ongoing experiments and
failures, and upon citizen education, involves moving beyond an analysis merely of TV's
representation and staging of participation and group governance and looking toward how the citizengames and citizen-experiments occur through an array of technologies (machines, devices, skills, and
logics that currently comprise and have transformed televisuality). Indeed, the reinvention of TV has
occurred through various technological means of participation and group-governance - technologies
that work in conjunction with the particular kinds of experiments, games, and demonstrations in group
governance discussed in Chapter 5. And the linkages between TV's enactment of group governance

and other forms of local and national government are complexly intertwined with the adoption of, and
ongoing experiments about, these technologies of participation.
This section first considers some of the trends and implications of the recent technology of viewercitizen participation - technology that is profoundly about accountability, about counting and being
counted. Given that democracy is a technical achievement, what are the televisual technologies of
voting/counting in recent times? And how is what counts and who counts for full membership and
citizenship (active players in group governance) a matter of knowing and mastering not only the
techniques and "rules of the game" but also the hardware (the material technology) of citizenship?
TV's "reinvention," and its relation to the "reinvention of government," is a history of technological
practice. The proliferation of cable channels in the United States since the 1970s has occurred through
specific technologies of viewer participation and interaction. The most widespread transformation
since the 1970s has been the reliance upon remote-control devices which allow viewers not only to
switch channels from a distance but also to avoid advertising, control volume levels, and (by the late
1980s) to watch two channels at the same time."' The remote control became a standard provision of
audio and TV manufacturers as well as cable companies for their customers, such that the
proliferation of cable channels and remote-control devices was interdependent. Not only did the
widespread adoption of remote controls make viewers active in a different way than before their use,
but their use was often perceived by TV programmers and advertisers as undermining attention to
programming and channel loyalty. And the creation by cable channels of lifestyle programming
became a way for emerging cable channels to gain a foothold in the TV market.
In its earliest days, "live" TV in the United States represented interactions onscreen between studio
audiences and the onstage moderators, hosts, and performers. By the late 1980s, however, the
telephone (which, like the remote control, had become increasingly portable in US households) began
to be a resource for viewer interaction and participation with certain emerging forms of TV
programming and network. "Home-shopping" programs and networks, in particular, used customer
call-ins to make purchases offscreen and to register customer input about the product being sold
onscreen. This practice also became common in religious broadcasting (e.g., testimonials and
financial contributions on Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Channel and Jim and Tammy
Baker's Heritage broadcasting). Radio talk-show personality Larry King also helped convert his
radio format for TV, hosting one of the most successful programs on CNN by the late 1980s.
By the late 1980s, TV networks and cable-service providers began to refine techniques for tracking
and calculating viewership through these technological appendages to TV watching. Not only could
cable subscriptions be counted and used as a standard for program-bundling and fees, but the cable
providers became accountants of what viewers watched - and over the 1990s, when and for how long
they watched particular programming. The model of "on-demand" programming (a practice that
promised viewers more choice and freedoms) worked in a similar way to account for and calculate
viewing habits. Satellite TV providers, such as Direct TV and Dish Network, thus promise customers
"free choice" among various program-packages designed for lifestyle clusters (e.g., Dish TV's 2006
marketing of packages titled "Dish Latino" and "Dish Family").

Over the late 1990s, TV's reinvention occurred through the conjunction of these forms of audience
participation (which also were ways that audiences were calculated and assessed) with Web-based
technologies. A report by the Center for Digital Democracy noted in 2001 that "as today's multichannel television is transformed through computerization and sophisticated set-top boxes, technology
is now being put in place with the goal of collecting information from individual consumers and
families. This information will be harvested in data profiles, which will be used to target individual
consumers with personalized advertising."" Mark Andrejevic similarly has noted that reality TV's
techniques of voyeurism and exhibitionism, and its "lottery of celebrity" (the promise that anyone can
become a star through reality TV's contests), are accomplished through web sites where viewers
actively provide/produce information about themselves, thus making the game of voyeurism into an
economy of surveilling consumers and of active, productive consumers.'8 For Andrejevic, the
promise of greater democracy through the internet must be considered in these terms - as forms of
participation and interactivity through which citizen-consumers are counted.
Without refuting Andrejevic's important insights about TV's current "economy of interactivity," we
want to consider how the procedures and technologies of participation and "interactivity" pertain to a
current governmental rationality about citizenship and about the necessary procedures and
experiments of democracy - how they pertain to the "reinvention" of liberal government, which
expects that democracy be conducted through new technical procedures. Paradoxically, for
democracy to be effective it requires new, endlessly updated and refined technical procedures.
Because it is difficult to ascribe to democracy one universal way of being enacted, our analysis of TV
seeks to understand what is expected of democracy now, through current techniques which often are
cast as improvements over the past and as providing a new and improved democracy.
One of the most remarkable examples of TV's current matrix of remote-controllability and
accountability was Fox's Todd TV a brief experiment involving a subject (Todd) who is commanded
to perform certain tasks, and then rated on his performance, by viewers who send text-messages (via
T-Mobile cell-phones, the program's primary sponsor). Although Todd TV was a behavioral
experiment par excellence, with viewers testing Todd's capacity to perform demeaning and
sometimes unhealthy tasks, the program gleefully showcased the capacity of TV for "popular," group
governance by viewers - viewers who were encouraged to be interactive and whose vote
immediately was tallied, even though Todd would only perform one viewer's command at a time. In
that sense, the show's self-described objective of "building a better Todd" not only became a social
experiment linking participatory group government with the government of the self, it also articulated
the "improvement" of its main subject (Todd) with the "advancement" of TV, now "better suited" for
the citizen-subject of democratic participation (the interactive TV viewers).
Viewers voting on whether Todd should succeed or whether he merited celebrity status was not an
allegory, spectacle, or debasement of democracy; it was one enactment of group governance by
viewers whose technology has become integral to a political process and legitimated by a
governmental rationality. And its "advancement" of TV as technology of democratic participation
needs to be assessed in those terms. Although Todd TV was canceled after only a few months, its
design reformulated, on a smaller scale, another Fox program that was designed as a national election
of national celebrity - the reality TV hit, American Idol. American Idol is a marathon process of

selection that moves back and forth between snippets of individual performers and of groups amassed
in various cities around the United States. Like The Apprentice, American Idol is a citizen-game
refereed by a panel of experts - authorities in contemporary musical tastes, sensibilities, and
marketability. Contestants perform (and the producers accentuate the contestants' representation of)
various musical genres and those genres'/ performers' relation to particular regions of the country,
thus making cultural citizenship one object of voting and regulation/management - by the judges and
the viewers who submit their votes electronically. 19 More than The Apprentice, however, American
Idol calls attention to the role of viewers (as the nation and the people) in helping decide which
contestant best exemplifies and represents a particular expression of cultural citizenship through
musical performance and television. Although citizenship-games such as The Apprentice design weblinks to encourage viewer interactivity, American Idol thus far has been the series in the United States
that most relies upon the massive mobilization of viewers as voters. To the extent that American Idol
is a national event, its status as event has been its ability to mobilize literally millions of viewers as
voters in a national election.
As voting becomes a standard technique of designing and watching TV programs (as media such as
TV, print journalism, and radio are reinvented through technologies of "interactivity"), emerging webTV initiatives often cast themselves as more democratic than older broadcast media (or even than
current cable or satellite TV packages). YouTube, whose logo appropriates or parodies the logo of
TV Guide (the foremost TV programming guide for over fifty years) and whose motto is "Broadcast
Yourself," is a web site organized as a collection of short video pods purportedly submitted by
anyone. Links to each video are accompanied by a tabulation of the number of viewers who have
watched it and by a four-star rating (voting) system, now standard features of service-industry and ecommerce web sites such as eBay, Amazon.com, and Hotwire.com. The most highly rated providers
of videos on YouTube are allowed to create "channels" (collections of their video submissions) that
are linked to "subscribers" and "active groups." Like the Todd-TV experiment, YouTube thus
articulates programs of self-actualization ("broadcasting yourself') with exercises in group testing and
group governance (the formation of "active groups"). YouTube's web site is a visual display of a
rationality that organizes, differentiates, and links self-broadcasters and "active groups." Democracy
Player is a similar site which distinguishes its process and objectives from regular TV (and even
alternative web-TV sites such as YouTube) by casting itself as built upon a capacity to improve
media democracy. Its web site states that the network "promotes" and "supports democracy" through a
"free and open-source Internet-TV platform." Democracy Player, beside representing itself through
the current liberal emphasis upon being a citizen-"player," attributes its democratic possibilities to
choice (400 channels as of 2006) made by net-izens who have the technical knowledge to participate
and associate in a platform such as this. A third web-TV platform that promotes its usefulness in
terms of its promotion of an improved media-based democracy is Current TV whose most recognized
organizer is former Vice President Al Gore. According to Current TVs web site, the network "is a
national cable and satellite channel dedicated to bringing your voice to television." Like You Tube
and Democracy Player, Current TV is primarily a menu of "viewer-created content"; according to the
web site, "anyone who wants to can upload a video." Unlike the other two web-TV platforms,
however, Current TV pays for, and temporarily has rights to, videos that the network makes available.
It also makes available only videos approved by "members of the on-line community" (i.e.,

subscribers who have the right to vote) and uses submitted videos in only one-third of its overall
programming.
Reality TV is Technically Part of the Political Process
Just prior to announcing the winner of the fifth season of American Idol (2006), moderator Ryan
Seacrest proclaimed to the program's audience that the 64 million votes cast for the season's winner
had been "more votes than for any president in history." If one is to believe this claim by the
producers of American Idol, Taylor Hicks (the year's winner) received more votes than did George
W. Bush, in either 2004 or the infamous 2000 elections.

Illustration 6.1 The interactive dimensions of programs like American Idol are often taken as
"democracy" on television (Freemantlemedia, North America for Fox, 2005)
On May 12, 2006, many newspapers across the United States published two stories - one about an
alleged snafu involving electronic voting equipment the night before, when contestant Chris Daughtry
was eliminated from the American Idol competition, and one about an alleged vulnerability of
Diebold, Inc.'s touch-screen voting equipment in a Pennsylvania election of political candidates.20
Thousands of unhappy fans and supporters of Daughtry protested to Fox and the program's production
company, claiming that the vote either was rigged or was skewed due to numerous reports of
problems with the telephone-recording service that registered votes for specific candidates. In
Pennsylvania, a Carnegie-Mellon professor of computer science warned that the Diebold system,
whose touch-screen technology had been mandated by Congress because it was supposed to correct
the kinds of voting irregularities attributed to punchcard ballots in the 2000 presidential election, still
contained inherent vulnerabilities to hacking and thus to vote-tampering.
On July 28, 2006, in the midst of meetings concerning the crisis between Israel and Lebanon, George

Bush invited the finalists of the year's American Idol competition for a meeting with him at the White
House. One TV program reporting on the event cited a poll conducted by a company, Pursuant, Inc.,
on the evening of the final vote which purported that 35 percent of those casting votes for their
favorite "American idol" believed that their American Idol vote "counted as much or more" than their
vote for president of the United States.
In times that have supported initiatives to "reinvent government" through "public-private
partnerships," it sometimes is difficult to distinguish where the techniques and technology of public
government end and those of private government begin - where the procedures for voting and counting
in elections for public office end and the procedures for membership in private associations or for
reality TV's citizenship-games begin. This is not necessarily a recent trend; however, the rationale
about reinventing government draws the procedures and technologies of public and private
government into a relation that can not be explained by a broad assertion that TV either is or is not
democratic - or that TV necessarily erodes or enhances a democratic political process. Nor is it
enough to point out that sometimes TV blurs the difference between "real politics" and TV's games or
experiments of government. Rather, how is it that the procedures and technologies of public and
private government (as political process) operate interdependently, though not necessarily or always
uniformly?
To say that reality TV offers demonstrations in group participation and governance is to point out
TV's little, everyday ways of instructing viewers about the techniques and rules of participation. The
Apprentice enacts a process of group decision-making and deliberation, culminating in a staged board
meeting where Donald Trump leads players through a series of questions that require each player and
team to reflect on who should advance and who should be terminated. The demonstration also offers
viewers a means, as Trump repeatedly points out, of learning how to manage corporate groups
effectively. While The Apprentice is not overtly about a "political process" (that is, in the narrow
sense of "electoral politics"), its demonstrations of corporate accountability become, technically,
interdependent with the procedures for political accountability in the United States in these times.
This is not to say only that citizens are governed, or that state government operates, like a corporation;
it is to say that The Apprentice is one site (and a popular one) where public and private government
intersect.' It is to point out that the technology and procedures of democracy are spread out over daily
life - across various forms and sites of membership and association where one counts and is made
accountable. Some forms and sites of participation through voting (election by rules and technologies
of counting/representation) matter more to certain populations than to others. This point particularly
applies to contemporary TV, where different viewers are more invested in one channel or group of
channels than another - or in one program rather than another. TV networks and program producers
conceive of their audiences as associations where viewers are expected to actively demonstrate their
involvement and membership, through programs that often are experiments and games in deciding
collectively who's in and who's out. So given that democracy's enactment is "spread out" across daily
life, and across TV's various kinds of programming, each with their own constitutions/rules of
participation ("rules of the citizenshipgame"), one of democracy's current paradoxes is that the
political process is diffuse but that certain technologies and procedures cross over and are shared
between public and private enactments of democracy (e.g., between electing a state senator, an

American idol, or an Apprentice). Another current paradox is that by enacting democracy through
private associations only certain citizens/members get to operate these technologies and to vote on
who is included and who is excluded.
The technologies through which various TV networks have marketed lifestyle clusters have been
integral to initiatives for mobilizing viewers in recent electoral politics. The oldest and most
recognized of these convergences has been the "Rock the Vote" campaign. Begun in 1990 as a drive to
register young voters for the 1992 presidential election, Rock the Vote has expanded from its initial
and primary connection with MTV to become a multimedia enterprise (even as the number and
percentage of young voters has declined since 1992). Historically, Rock the Vote emerged with the
discourse about "reinventing government" through "public-private partnerships." The Rock-the-Vote
Action Center web site lists an alliance among three kinds of "partners" - nonprofit, creative, and
corporate (the latter including MTV, Sony, and other major media companies). Its rationale for its
initiatives has articulated a liberal commitment to freedom (e.g., artistic freedoms or media freedoms
perceived as under attack during the Reagan and GHW Bush presidencies): "Rock the Vote is
dedicated to protecting freedom of expression and empowering young people to change their world.""
As both a form of media "outreach" and an engine for voter-registration (shaping civic-minded youth),
Rock the Vote's techniques of mobilization rely upon the same techniques that MTV has used for other
kinds of voting (e.g., MTV programs such as Total Request Live and Rock Countdown, the latter of
which uses a web site where viewers can cast votes for favorite musical celebrities). Following (and
partly modeled after) Rock the Vote's public recognition, Oxygen Network used its status as a TV
channel for women, and the first TV network designed to educate women about internet use, to
conduct a voter-registration drive for women in the 2000 presidential campaign, and has since
aligned itself with Declare Yourself, a voter-registration campaign for young women. For the 2004
presidential campaign, Black Entertainment TV (BET) similarly became involved in the National
Action Network, a voterregistration initiative for African-American youth. Both of these latter two
TV networks were part of partnerships between "nonprofits" and media corporations.
TV's techniques and experts of personal makeover and selfactualization increasingly have become
integral to the electoral campaign process during the era of government's "reinvention." In the lead-up
to the 2004 presidential election, Dr. Phil interviewed both presidential candidates, George W. Bush
and John Kerry, and their wives. Through these interviews (advertised as a "special event"), the two
presidential candidates acted upon TV's preeminent laboratory of self-improvement (a TV doctorcum "life coach" who offers guidelines for correcting one's behavior). And Dr. Phil's life-strategies
acted upon the national electoral process - the preeminent citizenship-game and laboratory of national
group governance.23 While presidential candidates have appeared increasingly in entertainment
venues on TV since the late 1980s, these interviews represent a more recent convergence of self-help
coaches and political government. Dr. Phil also went to Mississippi (and not Louisiana) in the
aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, where he counseled victims about "self-matters" and how to restart
their lives - challenging them to pull themselves up by the soggy straps of their wading-boots.24 The
web site for these specials solicited donations but also provided "resources" for victims, including
the Salvation Army, the United Way, Mercy Corps, Habitat for Humanity, America's Second Harvest,
and the USA Freedom Corp. In another Katrina-related initiative, Laura Bush participated in a

broadcast of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (which she described as her favorite TV series) set in
Biloxi, Mississippi - another demonstration of TV's role in providing the resources by which citizens
are supposed to govern and help themselves. The two latter programs in particular are noteworthy for
their emphasis upon partnerships between for-profit TV and "nonprofits" that have been rationalized
by the Bush administration as part of the "armies of compassion" - assisting, and not doing the work
of, state institutions.
These trends in recent TV have occurred amid the proliferation of programs and channels that not only
dramatize the work of "public," state institutions but literally extend the technology and procedures of
these institutions. We want to be clear about what has changed. TV has long dramatized the work of
various public institutions - TV series about police, emergency rescue units, the courts, the military,
and national political office. However, since the late 1990s numerous TV channels and programs
have emerged that do not involve professional actors but instead draw directly from the proceedings
of public institutions. Court TV is a channel that programs hours of court proceedings as well as
dramatizations which use video of court proceedings. And although there are past examples of
"reality" courtroom TV (e.g., Divorce Court), the number of these programs (outside the Court TV
Channel) has grown immensely since the 1990s.25 Cops, America's Most Wanted, and To Catch a
Predator are examples of recent TV series that extend the procedures and techniques of local and
national police work, with the last two programs having assisted actual lawenforcement efforts to
apprehend criminal suspects. The Military Channel programs hours of video made by soldiers and
often produced by the US military. The NASA Network programs hours of footage of US missions in
outer space. The Weather Channel emphasizes its recent partnerships with the National Oceanic &
Atmospheric Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Department of Homeland
Security. C-SPAN offers two channels of (sometimes live) proceedings in the US Congress. All of
these channels and programs are rationalized as educational and as demonstrations of how
"government works." In that sense, they are a new way that TV forges a relation between government
and citizens. Most importantly, these developments do not necessarily mark a withering away of
government (ceding the work of state institutions to commercial TV), but rather an extension of
government - even as this extension in another respect makes government more reliant upon
privatized, commercial resources (i.e., upon a kind of "outsourcing" through TV, that matches TV
corporations' own "outreach"). They provide a framework for TV events such as Dr. Phil's and the
First Lady's "work" in Mississippi as examples of TV's instrumentality within the Bush
administration's "compassionate conservatism." Or, as when The Apprentice broadcasts arranged
meetings between its young contestants and public office holders (such as New York Senator Charles
Schumer and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg), TV invites the office holders of state
government to authorize TV's own exemplary displays of entrepreneurialism, corporate citizenship,
and private group government.
The political process in the United States is regularly trumpeted as being responsible for the most
"advanced democracy" in the world. "Advancing" freedom and democracy (or at least a US model of
democracy) was George W. Bush's mantra for mobilizing the United States to wage a war in Iraq.
Once citizens in Iraq "tasted" democracy, there would be no stopping its spread throughout the
Middle East. "Exporting" or "advancing" democracy in Iraq has occurred in part through the US CIA

funding of the Iraqi Media Network and its first TV channel, Al Iragiya.26 This effort to shape the
"hearts and minds" of Iraqi citizens floundered during its first year, but in early 2005 it produced a
US-style reality TV series, Terrorism in the Hands of Justice. Broadcast two times a day and six days
a week, the program presented actual prisoners confessing their crimes to a video camera,
interspersed by reactions of Iraqis to the bombing/crime attributed to the prisoner. While the series
resembled US court TV programs and series such as America's Most Wanted (programs which extend
an institution of State through TV), and while the series clearly was a strategy by the US government
to build or shape a new "civil society" in Iraq, the program also operated in lieu of a national judicial
system since Iraqis had not yet voted on a constitution or its first government. Judgment and "justice"
through this program therefore denied prisoners due process and legal aid, generally assuming the
guilt of prisoners who had been coerced to confess and who often bore clear signs of having been
beaten, tortured, or drugged. The program also exhibited a "direct justice," mediated by TV: viewers
were invited to act as juries - to call in, vote, express their outrage, report on other suspects, and in
this way participate in an exhibition of "democratic" reform and government's reinvention mediated
by the country's emerging regime of reality TV. This regime (of TV and democracy in Iraq) is a
process wherein citizens who watch particular kinds of TV can be empanelled as jury - to decide
who's in and who's out.27
To say that TV in the United States is technically part of a political process is not in itself a new
claim about TV. Beginning from this assumption, however, requires that one figure out how the
political, as process and procedures, occurs within a rationale about government and the sanctioning
of particular experiments in democracy. These experiments are designed through TV's "partnerships"
and "outreach" with corporate and "nonprofit" groups that collectively serve as the rule-makers and
often (as in The Apprentice) as referees in demonstrations and games of group governance and
citizenship. However, the experimentalism of this process is itself fraught with failure, and we
emphasize that TV is a laboratory for democracy in order to emphasize this experimentalism and
ongoing effort to test limits and to manage failure. Arguably, failure is what is at stake in
contemporary TV's games and demonstrations of group governance and citizenship - programs that are
about testing the limits and capacities of participants to decide who is most suited to govern. And, as
noted at the outset of this section, the technology of TV's projects in democratic participation and
group governance (i.e., how one votes) is itself a series of experiments and failures. There are
numerous recent examples of reality TV's celebration of failure - of citizens who have lost their civic
virtues (e.g., jackass, Viva la Bam, and The Bad Girls Club), even as they demonstrate their
individual freedoms to take risks and to "act up," at least within the rules that TV has set for risk and
misbehavior.
It is not sufficient to see the current interfaces between TV programming and other media as simply a
matter of progress and modernization, and particularly as heralding either a refinement or diminution
of "democracy." Democracy has always been a technical achievement, and the current interfaces
among media ("new" and "old") are instrumental to the current interdependencies between the public
and private rules and technologies for participating in the citizenshipgame - a "reinvention" of
democracy and self-government that involves numerous paradoxes. In May 2007, the broadcast of the
first televised debate among Republican presidential candidates at the Ronald Reagan Library

involved procedures that the broadcast's host network (MSNBC) promoted as unprecedented and as
an improvement upon the election process that once occurred on "pre-interactive" TV: candidates
would be asked questions submitted through the Politico.com web site by TV viewers, presumably
after the questions were screened by MSNBC and Politico.com's producers and relayed to the event's
moderator, Chris Matthews. As Andrejevic would point out, there is monetary value added through
this event's production at the intersection between TV and the Web. But another issue is that the
interactive televisualization of this game of citizenship and democracy not only reinvents the rules and
technical procedures of the electoral game; it puts on display the value of the "public-private
partnership" in "improving upon" the past limitations of broadcast TV. Here, viewers are not
"building a better Todd" but supposedly refining a process to select the best candidate. And, like
Todd TV the event affirms in this way the civic virtue of "reinventing government" by "reinventing
TV" - by making the televisualization of the political process participatory through current techniques
that embed political campaign in the playing field or game-board of American Idol and The
Apprentice.
If a lesson to be learned from reality TV is that, by voting (enacting democracy and self-government)
through private associations, only certain citizens/ members get to operate the technologies and to
vote on who is included and who is excluded, then how does enacting democracy today rely upon
these private associations? To isolate the MSNBC event as single text or spectacle misses the
numerous intersecting networks and technologies of accountancy and polling through which the
participation occurs, and how voting through privately organized associations drives and naturalizes
the formality of electing candidates for public office. Contemporaneous with TV-initiatives such as
MTV's Rock the Vote, Moveon.org and other activist websites have developed voting campaigns for
subscribers. Sometimes these campaigns "take the pulse" of their subscribers by asking them how they
would vote on particular reforms or candidates, and sometimes the campaigns state that those votes
will reveal how the subscribers want the association to devote its resources. In both cases, the voting
campaigns are instrumental not just in gauging the will of the majority but in mobilizing subscribers to
contact the legislators and administrators of state government, or to vote for office holders. The
webassociations serve as portals between a set of procedures technically linking private and public
citizenship, and private, subscription-based voting is part of a long process of electing office holders.
One other lesson to be learned from reality television about the current paradox of democracy in the
United States leads back to the technologies of membership and participation discussed at the outset
of this section - and specifically back to the private, national-popular voting juggernaut, American
Idol. The show's distributor, Fox TV, is not a network of subscribing members, unless one counts the
fees paid by viewers for usually the lowest tier of cable subscriptions, or the fees paid to Internet and
mobile phone service providers through which viewers vote. (And these frequently unacknowledged
forms of subscription do indeed matter as a prerequisite for playing the game.) In the spring of 2007,
a "crisis" of the series was not simply whether the voting apparatus had failed by having excluded
thousands, maybe even millions, of voters who were confused about how to vote for particular
contestants or were confident that their votes had not been properly recorded (as had happened in
2006); instead the crisis was whether voters would destroy the series by voting for an "unworthy"
candidate. The most visible point of the crisis was candidate Sanjaya Malakar's worthiness to be an

American Idol, at least according to the codes and conventions of celebrity and musical performance
that the show upholds. There were almost weekly reports that American Idol's system for recording
votes was being "overtaken" by telephone switchboard operators in India who had programmed
computers to automatically and endlessly vote for Malakar - or (according to an only less slightly
xenophobic rumor) that a segment of US citizens, the IndianAmerican population, was voting as a
bloc for Malakar. The show's legitimacy as a pure reflection of majority rule, however, was called
most into question by disc jockey Howard Stern's quite public campaign to mobilize his listeners to
vote en masse for Malakar in order to elect the most unworthy and illegitimate contestant.28 That the
reputed six million listeners to Stern's subscription program on Sirius Radio could affect the outcome
from the reputed thirty million votes that American Idol records a week (perhaps in addition to the
bloc of reputed Indian and Indian-American voters!) was enough to compel Fox to issue a statement
vouching for the fairness and legitimacy of privatized Idol-voting in America. At the time of writing,
it is difficult to decide whether the "crisis" of Idol election in America is a crisis that should be
welcomed or dreaded; most viewers might say that it all depends on which celebrity or media
channel (Stern or Malakar) you prefer, or subscribe to. But to the extent that it became (however
temporarily) a crisis of fealty in democratic procedures, and that it offers one of the most visible and
widely followed enactments of the privatization of national voting, then it is necessary to recognize
and map the changing networks and programs (privatized and public) upon which the American Idol
is selected and through which it is seen to be endangered, requiring future and somehow more refined
techniques for managing. Such are the requirements and challenges for an analytic of governmentality
in these times and in this place.
Mapping the televisual linkages between public and private enactments of democracy leads to one
other (maybe not so final) event. During the final stages of its 2007 season, American Idol conducted
its "Idol Gives Back" campaign to raise money for charities by using the show's participatory
technologies to garnish financial-aid contributions from viewers.29 The campaign was certainly a
shining example of the kind of privatized welfare provision that has been championed by the
initiatives to "reinvent government," particularly by the Bush-Cheney administration. And it proudly
articulated the virtue of participatory government (of "government by and for the people") with the
neoliberal virtue of the "government of the self' (citizens who actively look after and take care of
themselves). So it was no small coincidence that President George Bush and First Lady Laura Bush
punctuated the fund drive by appearing through a satellite TV feed (or a videorecording) to praise the
show and its viewers. At the conclusion of their address to the Idol nation, the president asked the
First Lady whether she thought he ought to sing for the audience, and she replied, smiling, "I don't
know, darlin'; they've already seen you dance." Mrs. Bush was referring to the couple's participation
the week before in a performance by a group of West African musicians in the grounds of the White
House - an event widely distributed and often lampooned over TV news and comedy programs and on
web sites such as YouTube. While the president's appearance on American Idol was yet another
instance of State government acting upon the private laboratories and gameboards of democracy in the
United States, it also might have been one of the last means by which citizens (in the United States or
India) could vote for or against Bush - even though it certainly would not be the last televisual stage
for "advancing" liberal government.

Conclusion
For Jenkins's book, discussed at the outset of this chapter, the key to fostering a culture and politics of
participation lies in "media education," an endeavor whose goal is teaching viewers and consumers
how to be actively engaged with the current media culture. As he notes, "We need to rethink the goals
of media education so that young people [and adults] can come to think of themselves as cultural
producers and participants and not simply as consumers, critical or other- wise.i30 Education is
crucial for overcoming the "participation gap." While Jenkins may be right about rethinking "media
education" as a civic enterprise, education and even "media education" are already integral to the
current regime of TV. TV does in fact instruct, and now through a practice of game playing and group
participation and through a rationality about citizenship and participatory governance that was less
pronounced in the days of earlier TV. If anything, Jenkins's argument - like Hartley's - does not press
hard enough at the paradoxes of freedom and control, of self-actualization through learning, or of the
practice of entering into forms of self-government as self-discipline.
In one sense, our project recognizes the importance of Hartley's intervention that casts contemporary
TV, and the future legacy of TV, as a form of citizenship training. Hartley rightly ties TV as civic
education to TV's "do-it-yourself' features and to "democratainment" - to TV's twin capacities to
educate and entertain. However, unlike Hartley, we see the freedoms afforded by Do-It-Yourself-TV
as an objective of a governmental rationality that values self-enterprise, selfreliance, and lessons to
be learned in privatized experiments and games of self-constitutions and group government. So if
there is to be a kind of media education that is oriented toward the shaping of future citizens (as we
hope this book is), we suggest that this education first and foremost begins by recognizing how - in or
out of the classroom - we are implicated in forms of learning and knowledge that tie our citizenships
to the games and experiments of government. And as Dr. Phil is prone to say, we all "have a lot of
work to do." Imagining or performing political reform through new and changing forms of media
citizenship is a path complicated by televisual teachers and "life coaches" such as Phil McGraw
whose regimen for self-actualization is that "life is not cured, it is managed."31 Recognizing these
complications are a starting point, not an end, for a politics that occurs through the networks,
programs, policies, and constitutions of life management, which each of us traverse daily.

Notes
Notes to Introduction

1 Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
1999), p. 209.
2 See Michel Foucault, "Governmentality," in The Foucault Ef ect: Studies in Governmentality, ed.
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
Michel Foucault, "Omnes et Singulatim: Toward a Critique of Political Reason," "The Subject and
Power," "Governmentality," and "The Political Technology of Individuals," in Power, ed. James
Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1994); Michel Foucault, "The Birth of Biopolitics," "On the
Government of the Living," "Technologies of the Self," "The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a
Practice of Freedom," and "On the Genealogy of Ethics," in Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:
The New Press, 1994); and Michel Foucault, "Politics and Reason," in Politics, Philosophy, Culture,
ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New York and London: Routledge, 1989).
3 Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose, "Introduction," in Foucault and Political
Reason: Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas
Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 8.
4 The latter expression from Gramsci, "The State as Veilleur de nuit - Night-watchman," in David
Forgacs (ed.), The Antonio Gramsci Reader (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), p. 236. Of
particular importance to our project in the writing of Gramsci is his conception of the modern State as
an "ethical" and "cultural" State. In part, Gramsci used the terms "ethical" and "cultural" to
underscore how modern, liberal government operated through (relied upon) an array of private
institutions for public education. While Gramsci's use of the term education is somewhat vague (or
robust), he clearly viewed the modern State, and its reliance upon "the private institutions and
activities," as mechanisms for linking moral and cultural uplift, welfare, and caring as technologies of
governing populations. For Gramsci, civil society (the "State" and process of moral and cultural
uplift) was thus the objective and the resource of modern, liberal government. The State casts itself
and is required to play a supportive role in looking after the welfare of the population and in ensuring
a robust civil society - upon which it acts, through which it governs (at a distance), and from which
the goodness and caring of the State can be demonstrated. For this reason, Gramsci (following
Lassalle) also understood the State/government less as authoritarian than as "night-watchman." For
Gramsci, one of the most fundamental characteristics of liberal government in early twentieth-century
nation-states (including Italian Fascism) was its role in watching over and cultivating the private
institutions and activities by which society was made civil and moral (and thus was regulated)
through education and culture.
5 Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Refraining Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), p. 27; we draw here from Ron Greene's elaboration of the "modernization"
of pastoral power. See Ronald Walter Greene, "Y Movies: Film and the Modernization of Pastoral
Power," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2.1 (2005), pp. 20-36.

6 Rose, Powers of Freedom.

7 Alexandra Chasin, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
8 For a critique of neoliberalism as market rationality see Wendy Brown, "Neoliberalism and the End
of Liberal Democracy," Theory & Event, 7:1 (2003); Nikolas Rose, "Governing `Advanced'
Democracies," in Foucault and Political Reason, pp. 37-64, and Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of
Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press,
2003).
9 Rose, "Governing," p. 45; see also Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private
Self (2nd ed., London: Free Association Books, 1999) and Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power
and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
10 Rose, "Governing," pp. 47-8; Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of
Social Welfare in America (New York: The Free Press, 1999); John Ehrenreich, The Altruistic
Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1985).
11 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995).
12 As Bennett has argued, "culture emerges as a pluralised and dispersed field of government which,
far from mediating the relations between civil society and the state or connecting the different levels
of a social fonnation, operates through, between, and across these in inscribing cultural resources into
a diversity of programs aimed at directing the conduct of individuals toward an array of different
ends, for a variety of purposes, and by a plurality of means" (Bennett, Culture: A Reformer's Science
[London: Sage, 1988], p. 77).
13 That approach has not tended to dwell on the usefulness of TV as a regimen for living one's life.
To consider TV's utility governmentally, it is necessary to avoid generalizing about culture, for if we
see culture as responsible for "everything," we lose sight of what regulates and instrumentalizes
culture within historically specific programs and technologies of government. How does culture
become an object and a resource of government/administration? How is culture acted upon through
the programs, strategies, and technologies of government? Addressing these questions is crucial to
thinking about how cultural politics occur through the privatization and personalization of
government, and specifically through the self-training of citizens through televisual programs. While
television also operates as a system of representation and ideological formation, our focus on
governmen- talization seems particularly helpful for thinking about media power in these times.
14 The preoccupation with "TV culture" has tended to downplay the technical and scientific
applications that occur through TV and other media because they are not the best examples of TV as a
popular art, story-form, or cultural form. TV began in the lab (the object of scientific invention and
experimentation), and although we side with Raymond Williams's effort to avoid a technologically

determinist view of TV's development, we emphasize more than he did TV's mattering and
transformation within the rationalities, science, and experimentalism of liberal government.
15 In part through TV, self-cultivation also involves how to watch TV, where to put it, what to do
with it, and thus how to manage it, at home and in one's daily life. Home-makeover TV often involves
tips for designing attractive and rational "media rooms" at home.
16 This point is elaborated by Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and
Other Subjects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
17 It is worth noting that our account differs from treatments of television, which have understood it
as a textual practice (narrative and genre criticism), as commercial activity (studies of TV/media
industries and advertising), or as a combination of these concerns. While we discuss television as a
form of representation (both semiotic and political) and recognize its commercial nature, we
emphasize how a wide variety of TV shows operate as advice, guides, and instructions, coordinating
and differentiating a set of knowledges and techniques for everyday living.
Our perspective also offers an alternative conception of the TV audience, which is typically cast as
consumers/spectators, as those subjected to media's effects, or conversely as active makers of
meanings and value. Instead we underscore the tension between the promise of agency, freedom, and
"active citizenship" that surrounds the care and management of the self, and the promise of democratic
reform (the procedures of democratic participation) that depends upon knowledge/power relations.
18 Our use of the term "civic laboratories" is indebted to Tony Bennett's use of the term to describe
museums. See Bennett, "Civic Laboratories: Museums, Culture Objecthood, and the Governance of
the Social," Cultural Studies, 19:5 (2005).
19 We do not mean to say that TV's programmatic qualities always have uniform and stable effects in
the lives of individuals and populations but that TV broadcasting in the United States has been
obsessed with experimenting with scheduling in order to foster TV's integration into how individuals
and populations organize and run their daily lives. Our analysis emphasizes what has not always been
foregrounded in studies of TV and modern media: media as technologies of government and
citizenship, and the TV/media program as curriculum, as outline of a performance, as prospectus and
agenda, as a plan or system under which action may be taken toward a particular goal. All of these
connotations have been implicit in analyses of TV and media but need further unpacking.
20 Nikolas Rose, "Governing," p. 47 (emphasis added).
21 "Despite posing itself as a critique of political government, it [neoliberalism] retains the
programmatic a priori, the presupposition that the real is programmable by authorities: the objects of
government are rendered thinkable in such a way that their difficulties appear amenable to diagnosis,
prescription, and cure. Neo-liberalism does not abandon the `will to govern': it maintains the view
that failure of government to achieve its objectives is to be overcome by inventing new strategies of
government that will succeed" (ibid., p. 5; emphasis added).

22 As Rose argues, "Historians of the present [should] avoid substantializing either the present or the
past. Rather than conceiving of our present as an epoch or a state of affairs, it is more useful, in my
own view, to view the present as an array of problems and questions, an actuality to be acted upon
and within by genealogical investigation, to be made amenable to action by the action of thought. As
an array of question of this type, the present calls for a style of investigation that is more modest than
that adopted by sociological philosophers of history. It encourages an attention to the humble, the
mundane, the little shifts in our ways of thinking and understanding, the small and contingent struggles,
tensions and negotiations that give rise to something new and unexpected" (Rose, Powers of Freedom,
p. 11).
23 Peter F. Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000).
24 Hayek is arguably one of the intellectual reference points for a "neoconservatism" that has
emerged in the United States since the 1960s. The last chapter of his The Constitution of Liberty
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), "Why I am not a Conservative," navigates and sorts out
the ambiguities of the terns "liberal" and "conservative" in the United States, as opposed to the
European, context. He argues that he is more a "liberal" than either a conservative or a socialist, even
though advocating a "party of liberty" is complicated by the way that liberalism has been construed in
the United States. He views conservatives as too prone to rely upon protectionism (hence their
nationalism and provincialism) rather than "free growth and spontaneous evolution" (p. 408). While
he acknowledges that the liberalism he advocates is closest to what in the United States is referred to
as "libertarianism," he rejects that terns, frustrated that there is not yet a proper term. Hayek's
predicament in the early 1960s is thus one way of thinking about the longing for a "new" conservatism
which recognizes that "the chief need is once more, as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, to free the process of spontaneous growth from the obstacles and encumbrances that human
folly [re: conservatism and socialism] has erected. Hayek's rationale is, in this sense, consonant with
Drucker's advocacy of "reprivatization" - the need and strategy to cure the "malaise" of the early
twentieth-century forms of public planning, welfare, and administration, and to do so through active,
generative terms such as "reprivatizing" and "reinventing" (i.e., through the language of "free growth
and spontaneous evolution").
25 "The choice ... is no longer either complete governmental indifference or complete governmental
control ... [We need] a government that can and does govern. This is not a government that `does'; it is
not a government that `administers'; it is a government that governs" (Drucker, Age of Discontinuity,
pp. 240, 242). Drucker considered "reprivatization" (not a retuni to the past, but an uncovering of the
natural organs of social and economic management) to be a "heretical doctrine" in the 1960s and
argued that privatizing government required a new way of thinking. His book was replete, however,
with examples beyond the nation-state where privatization was already successful, such as
international corporate management and international private-public ventures in space exploration
and global communication (e.g., COMSAT) so central to enacting liberal government on the New
Frontier.
26 Rose has suggested that Hayek's conceits about freedom and government, and his critiques of the
welfare state, took three decades after the 1960s to be "assembled into a politically salient assault on

the rationalities, programmes, and technologies of welfare in Britain, Europe, and the United States,"
but it is just as important to recognize how the discourse of privatization emerged during the 1960s
through programs (big and small) to mediate the contradictions surrounding emergent and residual
rationalities of welfare, public services, and liberal government. (As we explain below, returning to
the 1960s also allows us to consider how TV's emergence became instrumental to and problematic
for these rationalities.) The various "rights" movements of the 1960s, for instance, demanded that the
federal government look after the welfare of specific populations, even as their discourse of "rights"
could be articulated to a rationale such as Drucker's about privatization: "Reprivatization is hardly a
creed of `fat cat millionaires' when black-power advocates seriously propose making education in the
slums "competitive" by turning it over to private enterprise, competing for the tax dollar on the basis
of proven performance in teaching ghetto children. It may be argued that the problems of the black
ghetto in the American city are very peculiar problems - and so they are. They are extreme
malfunctions of modern government. But, if reprivatization works in the extreme case, it is likely to
work even better in less desperate ones." Rationales such as Drucker's became more central to a post1960s mobilization of conservatism in the United States through a rights discourse and through efforts
to demonstrate that the beneficiaries of publicly administered welfare were best served by and
naturally inclined toward privately administered programs.
27 In a 1986 speech, Indianapolis Mayor William Hudnut, for instance, described "entrepreneurial
government" as "willing to abandon old programs and methods. It is innovative and imaginative and
creative. It takes risks. It turns city functions into money makers rather than budget-busters. It eschews
traditional alternatives that offer only life-support systems. It works with the private sector. It
employs solid business sense. It privatizes. It creates enterprises and revenue generating operations. It
is market oriented. It focuses on perfornance measurement. It rewards merit. It says, `Let's make this
work,' and it is unafraid to dream the great dream" (cited in David Osborne and Ted Gabler,
Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector [Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991], p. 18).
28 The NPRG helped to justify the Hope VI program for redesigning public housing through publicprivate partnerships (e.g., with the collectivity of private architects and planners known as New
Urbanists) and through the "empowerment" of occupants to "take back" their "community."
29 In his campaign for the US presidency, Bush had stated bluntly his opposition to earlier forms of
welfare policy, which he considered to encourage dependency: "The new culture said if people were
poor, the government should feed them. If criminals are not responsible for their acts, then the
answers are not in prisons, but in social programs. People became less interested in pulling
themselves up by their bootstraps and more interested in pulling down a monthly government check. A
culture of dependency was born. Programs that began as a temporary hand-up became a permanent
handout, regarded by many as a right" (A Charge to Keep, pp. 229-30, Dec. 9, 1999).
30 The Bush administration's 2002 National Strategy jr oHomeland Security declared that the
department's mission is to "mobilize our entire society." In this way, a Homeland Security (as a
primary reason of state) becomes the most central means of administering the state's supportive role
in local, private, and personal techniques for helping, looking after, and taking care of oneself: "The

NSFHS recognizes the crucial role of state and local government, private institutions, and the
American people in securing our homeland. Our traditions of federalism and limited government
require that organizations outside the federal government take the lead in many of these efforts. The
NSFHS ... seeks to empower all key players by streamlining and clarifying the federal support
processes" (p. 3, emphasis added).
31 James Hay and Mark Andrejevic, Homeland Insecurities, special issues of Cultural Studies, JulySept., 2006.
32 Paul du Gay, In Praise ofBureaucracy: Weber, Organization, Ethics (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage,
2000).
33 See, for instance, Thomas Streeter, Selling the Air: A Critique o_f the Policy of Commercial
Broadcasting in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Susan Douglas,
Inventing American Broadcasting (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); and
Robert McChesney, Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy (Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995).
34 The rationalization of a plan for broadcasting in the United States dates back at least to the
formation of the Federal Radio Commission in 1927 and subsequently the Federal Communication
Commission in 1934.
35 Laurie Ouellette, Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002). See also Michele Hilmes, "Desired and Feared: Women's Voices in Radio
History," in Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays, ed. Mary Beth
Haralovich and Lauren Rabinowitz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 17-35.
36 "Primary responsibility for the American system of broadcasting rests with the licensee of
broadcast stations, including the network organizations. It is to the stations and networks rather than to
federal regulation that listeners must primarily turn to improved standards of program service. The
Commission [FCC] ... has a responsibility to consider overall program service .... but affinnative
improvement of program service must be the result primarily of other forces" (the "Blue Book" of
1946, a.k.a. "Public Service Responsibility of Broadcast Licensees," Documents of American
Broadcasting, 4th ed., p. 155).
37 Ouellette, Viewers Like You?
38 Dwight MacDonald, "A Theory of Mass Culture," in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America,
ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (New York: The Free Press, 1957).
39 James Hay, "Rethinking the Intersection of Cinema, Genre, and Youth," Scope, July 2002.
40 See Nicholas Sammond, Babes in Tonnorrou,land: Walt Disney and tine Makinti of tine American
Child, 1930-1960 (Durham, NC Duke University Press, 2003).

41 Newton Minow, "Address to the National Association of Broadcasters," Washington, DC, May 9,
1961, in Documents of American Broadcastin.c.
42 Ouellette, Viewers Like You?
43 Johnson's Message to Congress, H.R. Doc. 68, 90th Congress, 1st Session, Feb. 28, 1967, in
Documents of American Broadcasting.
44 Ibid.
45 And in this way, Drucker's point in 1968 about "black power" advocates "reprivatizing" the
administration of welfare (discussed above) becomes a dominant paradigm for TV's operation as
cultural technology. Through the proliferation of cable and satellite channels, TV was "freed" from a
broadcast model "limited" to three channels, even though the broadcast-model itself had been
rationalized as more liberal than the examples of state subvention typical of the rest of the world.
46 Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1992).
47 Chad Raphael, "The Political Economic Origins of Reali-TV" and Ted Magder, "The End of TV
101: Reality Programs, Formats, and the New Business of Television," both in Reality TV: Remaking
TV Culture, ed. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
48 The current regime of TV education at home has developed as part of (though not always or
necessarily in synergy with) the transformations of public schooling (as an older form of social
welfare) and the emergence of the "home-schooling" trend as an alternative to public education.
Notes to Chapter 1

1 Felicia R. Lee, "Raising Reality TV Stakes," New York Tinnes, Jan. 17, 2006.
2 Laurie Ouellette, Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002).
3 Nikolas Rose, "Governing `Advanced' Liberal Democracies," in Foucault and Political Reason:
Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Rationalities ofGovernment, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and
Nikolas Rose (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 37-64.
4 Ibid., p. 39.
5 Ibid., p. 49.
6 Mark Carl Rom, "From Welfare State to Opportunity, Inc.," American Behavioral Scientist, 43.1
(1999), p. 157.

7 Rose, Inventing Ourselves, pp. 164-5.

8 Ibid., p. 165.
9 Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on
Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003).
10 Rom, "From Welfare State," p. 155.
11 Ibid.
12 Thomas Streeter, Selling the Air: A Critique of the Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the
United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
13 Rose, "Governing," p. 38.
14 Wendy Brown, "Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy," Theory F~ Event, 7.1 (2003),
p. 3.
15 The Better Community project is described on the Disney corporate web site,
http://corporate.disney.go.com/outreach/better_coimnunity.html, as well as on the ABC web site,
wcvw.abc.com
16 John McMurria, "Desparate Citizens," Flow 3.3, www.flowtv.org
17 Extreme Makeover Home Edition, episode summaries, http://abc.go.com/
primetime/xtremehome/index.htmnl
18 Sears American Dream Campaign, http://w-,vw.searsamericandream.com
19 Martin Gilens, Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Linda Gordon (ed.), Women, The State, and Welfare
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
20 Gilens, Why America Hates Welfare.
21 Samantha King, "Doing Good by Running Well," in Foucault, Cultural Studies and
Governmentality, ed. Jack Bratich, Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2003), p. 297.
22 "Iowa Student Loan Assisted in Making Kobes' Dream Come True," Le Mars Daily Sentinel, Oct.
18, 2005.
23 Aniy Johannes, "NBC Grants `Three Wishes' To Promote New Series," Promo, Sept. 8, 2005,
http://promomagazine.com

24 Annia Ciezaldo, "Reality TV hits home in Baghdad," Christian Science Monitor, July 27, 2004.
Notes to Chapter 2

1 John Ehrenreich, The Altruistic Imagination: A History of Social Work and Social Policy in the
United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English,
For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts Advice to Women (New York: Doubleday, 1978);
Minn White, Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse on American Television (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1992). Our analysis is different from White's analysis of television's
therapeutic ethos for two reasons. First, we see television's turn to self-help as a technology of
citizenship that seeks to instill specific conduct and behaviors (including "personal responsibility")
rather than ideology. second, we focus on programs that have emerged since her focus on 1980s
television, and situate them within changing liberal and neoliberal strategies of governing.
2 Mary Ann Watson, The Expanding Vista: American Television in the Kennedy Years (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1990); for an analysis of East Side/West Side's engagement with civil rights
policy in particular see Aniko Bodroghkozy, "Negotiating Civil Rights in Prime Time: A Production
and Reception History of CBS's East Side/West Side," in Television: The Critical View, ed. Horace
Newcomb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
3 Wendy Brown, "Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy," Theory & Event, 7.1 (2003).
4 Nikolas Rose, "Governing `Advanced' Liberal Democracies," in Foucault and Political Reason:
Liberalism, Neoliberalism and Rationalities of Government, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne,
and Nikolas Rose (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 37-64. See also
Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (2nd ed., London: Free
Association Books, 1999) and Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and
Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
5 The SageWalk mission is described at www.sagewalk.com; see also http://abc.
go.com/primetime/bratcamp
6 Rose, "Governing," p. 57.
7 Ibid., pp. 58-9.
8 Stephen Labaton, "Transition to Digital Gets Closer," New York Times, Dec. 20, 2005.
9 Charlotte Brundson, "Lifestyling Britain: The 8-9 Slot on British Television," International Journal
of Cultural Studies, 6(1): 5-23.
10 Judy Sheindlin, Beauty Fades, Dumb is Forever (New York, Cliff Street Books, 1999), p. 112-13.
11 Quoted in Luaine Lee, `Judge Judy has always believed in the motto `just do it,"' Nando Media,
Nov. 28, 1998, www.nandotimes.com. For a detailed critique of the court program see Laurie

Ouellette, "Take Responsibility for Yourself Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen," in Reality TV:
Remaking Television Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
12 Barbara Cruikshank, "Revolutions Within: Self-Government and Self-Esteem," in Barry et al.,
Foucault and Political Reason, p. 231.
13 In addition to Cruikshank see Heidi Marie Rimke, "Governing Citizens Through Self-Help
Literature," Cultural Studies, 14.1 (2000), pp. 61-78.
14 Cruikshank, "Revolutions," p. 234.
15 Ibid., p. 89.
16 Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition (New
York: Routledge, 1997).
17 Brown, "Neoliberalism," p. 6.
18 Judy Sheindlin, Keep it Simple, Stupid (New York: Cliff Street Books, 2000), p. 2.
19 Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, "A Genealogy of `Dependency': Tracing a Keyword of the U.S.
Welfare State," in Fraser, Justice Interruptus.
20 Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self The History of Sexuality Volume 3 (New York: Vintage
Books, 1988); Technologies of the Self A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck
Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
21 Michel Foucault, Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York:
The New Press, 1994), p. 87.
22 Graham Burchell, "Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self," in Barry et al., Foucault and
Political Reason, p. 20.
23 www.drphil.com; see also Phillip C. McGraw, Life Strategies: Doing What Works, Doing What
Matters (New York: Hyperion, 1999).
24 www.drphil.com
25 Rose, Inventing Our Selves, p. 166.
26 www.startingovertv.com
27 Brown, "Neoliberalism," p. 6.
28 Foucault, Care of the Self.

29 Written Testimony of Marshall Manson, Vice President of Public Affairs, Center for Individual
Freedom, House Government Reform Committee Hearing on "The Supersizing of America," June 3,
2004, http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/legisla- tive_issues/state_issues/supersizing_america.htm
30 Rose, Inventing Our Selves, p. 162.
31 Quoted on George W. Bush, Families and Children, www.issues2000.org
Notes to Chapter 3

1 Valerie Walkerdine, "Reclassifying Upward Mobility: Femininity and the Neo-Liberal Subject,"
Gender and Education, 15:3 (2003), p. 240.
2 See, e.g., June Deery, "Trading Faces: The Makeover Show as Prisnetime `Infomercial,"' Feminist
Media Studies, 4:2 (2004), p. 211; and Helen Wood and Beverly Skeggs, "Notes on Ethical
Scenarios of Self on British Reality TV," Feminist Media Studies, 4:2 (2004), pp. 205-8.
3 Angela McRobbie, The Uses of Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2005), pp. 99-100.
4 Micki McGee, Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005), p. 130.
5 Peter Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century (New York: HarperBusiness, 1999),
pp. 163, 194, 183.
6 Tom Peters, "The Brand Called You," Fast Company, 10 (Aug. 1997), p. 83.
7 Toby Miller, "A Metrosexual Eye on Queer Guy," GLQ: A journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies,
11:1 (2005), p. 112.
8 Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science o_f Beauty (New York: Anchor Books, 2000).
9 Angela McRobbie, "From Holloway to Hollywood: Happiness at Work in the New Cultural
Economy?," in Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life, ed. Paul du Gay and
Michael Pryke (London: Sage, 2002), p. 100.
10 Richard Sennett, The New Culture of Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006),
pp. 9-10, 93.
11 Drucker, Management, p. 163.
12 Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), p. 159; McGee, Self Help, p. 166.
13 Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine, What You Wear Can Change Your Life (New York:
Riverhead Books, 2005), p. 11.

14 Laurel Graham, "Beyond Manipulation: Lillian Gilbreth's Industrial Psychology and the
Governmentality of Women Consumers," Sociological Quarterly, 38:4 (1997), pp. 539-65; Don
Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), p. 28.
15 Wendy Brown, "Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy," Theory & Event, 7:1 (2003),
p. 3.
16 Cronin quoted in David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 129.
17 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing
Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), pp. 53, 61.
18 Kathy Peiss, Hope in a _Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 1998), p. 144; see also Laurie Ouellette, "Inventing the Cosmo Girl: Class Identity and GirlStyle American Dreams," Media, Culture & Society, 21:3 (1999), pp. 359-83.
19 Valerie Walkerdine, Helen Lucey, and June Melody, Growing Up Girl: Psychosocial Explorations
of Gender and Class (New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 10.
20 Walkerdine, "Reclassifying," p. 238.
21 Gavin Kendall and Gary Wickham, Understanding Culture: Cultural Studies, Order, Ordering
(London: Sage, 2001).
22 John Saade and Joe Borgenicht, The Reality TV Handbook: An Insider's Guide: How to Ace a
Casting Interview, Form an Alliance, Swallow a Live Bug, and Capitalize on Your 15 Minutes of
Fame (New York: Quirk Books, 2004).
23 Lasch, Culture of Narcisissm, p. 65.
24 Sennett, New Culture, p. 99.
25 Paul du Gay, Consumption and Identity at Work (London: Sage, 1996).
26 Sennett, New Culture, p. 140.
27 McGee, Self-Help, pp. 128, 130.
28 McRobbie, "Holloway to Hollywood," p. 102.
29 Paul Smith, "Tommy Hilfiger in the age of Mass Customization," in No Sweat: Fashion, Free
Trade and the Rights of Garment Workers, ed. Andrew Ross (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 252-69.
30 McGee, Self-Help, p. 131.
31 Kiri Blakeley, "Tyra Banks On it," Forbes, July 3, 2006, pp. 120-6.

32 Margena A. Christian, "Tyra Banks: Says `It's a Lot More than just Looks' to Become `America's
Next Top Model'," Jet, May 26, 2003.
Notes to Chapter 4

1 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage, 1992) and Ecological
Politics in the Age of Risk (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
2 An essay that discusses some of early programs that tied "public health" to social management is
Michel Foucault, "The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century," in Power, ed. James O. Faubion
(New York: New Press, 1994), pp. 90-105.
3 This is a subject throughout Foucault's writing. See for instance, Michel Foucault, Madness and
Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Vintage, 1988), Birth of the
Clinic: The Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage, 1994), "The Birth of Social
Medicine," in Power, and "Psychiatric Power," in Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press,
1994).
4 As Rose has noted about the current stage of liberalism, "the social logics of welfare bureaucracies
and service management have been replaced by a new configuration of control agencies - police,
social workers, doctors, psychiatrists, mental health professionals - [that] become connected up with
one another in circuits of surveillance and communication designed to minimize the riskiness of the
most risky." Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.
260.
5 Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2004).
6 Randy Martin, The Financialization ofDaily Lie (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press,
2002).
7 The WorldCom bankruptcy was estimated to involve roughly $107 billion, as stock shares
plummeted from $62 in 2000 to 9c in early 2002. The Global Crossing bankruptcy was estimated to
involve roughly $25.5 billion, as stock shares fell from $64 in 2000 to less than $1 in early 2002.
8 Martin, Financialization, pp. 93-4.
9 Ibid., particularly "In the New Economy's Embrace," pp. 45-54.
10 Since the early 1980s, CNN has been the oldest all-news network in the United States and globally
that developed programs exclusively for financial news.
11 CNBC developed out of a merger during the early 1990s between the Consumer News and
Business Channel and the Financial News Network (FNN). While CNBC/FNN became affiliated
with NBC during the mid-1990s, the CNBC acronym (unlike MSNBC's) does not refer to its current

parent-company except as a matter of public perception. CNBC became a global network in 1998
when it took over the European Business Network (EBN).
12 Martin, Financialization, p. 106.
13 Ibid., p. 101.
14 Ibid., p. 43.
15 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage, 1970/3).
16 Andrejevic, Reality TV.
17 Self-reflection, as a strategy for risk management, does not always involve reviewing the past. As
we also have seen in Honey, We're Killing the Kids (Chapter 2), weighing the future risks of had
health-care is accomplished not just by replaying actions but by digitally projecting one's future life.
Whether by watching video replays of one's past self or by digitally producing forecasts of a future
self, contemporary TV programs such as these operate as a technology for self-objectification - for
putting one's self in the palm of one's hand in order to observe and reflect upon, and thus to
rationalize, personalize, and customize techniques for self-care.
18 Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Middletown., CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1992). Mobile privatization refers to the interdependence and mutually constitutive
dynamic between how societies shape spheres and technologies of privacy (establishing a place
removed from but with a specific relation to an outside or public sphere) and how their world is
made to move. In this sense, TV could be said to have developed and mattered not only within a
particular conception and design of house and home but within a home life that assumed and required
particular forms of transport. Hence, one might consider how TV, privacy, and mobility each shaped
the other two - how, for instance, "living at a distance" (to use Williams's phrase) in a post-World
War II suburban house required particular technologies such as TV or telephones as well as
automobiles and freeways as a private, personal system of transportation.
19 For theorizing the historical link between regimes of safety and communication, Hay's essay
recommends the work of the Dutch philosopher, Lieven de Canter, who has argued that media, as
extensions of man, enhance speed and increase flow/networks, which in turn have hastened the
development of forms of protection - or what de Cauter refers to as "capsularization" (Lieven de
Canter, "The Capsule and the Network: Notes toward a General Theory," in The Cybercities Reader,
ed. Stephen Graham, London and New York: Routledge, 2004). De Cauter's perspective is
particularly useful because it underscores that mass suburbanization - the regime of mobility and
privacy within which TV developed - has been a program of capsularization. For de Cauter, networktheory, which emphasizes the "space of flows" and an environment organized to maximize speed, too
often fails to recognize (indeed obscures) the capsule - membranes designed to insulate the body and
to minimize the risk of flow, speed, and networks. Individuals inhabit capsules rather than networks,

and one's access to the network is via a capsule. The capsule is thus a requirement and effect of
network formation: "No network without capsules. The more networking, the more capsules. In other
words, the degree of capsularization is directly proportional to the growth of network."
Because de Cauter sees capsularization as a condition of speed (of freedom enacted by a hypernobile
self and the modern technology of transport), he considers suburbanization as having supported both a
form of securitization that is "hyperindividualist" and a form of self-governance that is "neoliberal" in
its expectation that the risk-taker avail her/himself of available forns of capsularization (the
"technology of the self' as a technology of safety, of watching out for and over oneself).
20 James Hay, "Unaided Virtues: The (Neo-)Liberalization of the Domestic Sphere and the New
Architecture of Community," in Foucault, Cultural Studies, Govern mentality, ed. Jack Bratich,
Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
21 The number of companies providing home-security services and technologies proliferated over the
1980s. Two of the oldest US security services, the Brinks Co. and Advance Detection Technologies,
formed home-security divisions in the early 1980s.
22 Fears of privacy violation, for instance of personal, everyday exposure through one's trashcan,
also have contributed to the proliferation of the domestic paper-shredder. Since the 1980s, papershredding devices generally became a component of households reorganized and managed around
"personal computing." The console for home computing increasingly has become comprised of fax
and copy devices and thus has become a command-center for managing various home-computing risks
(e.g., viruses, worms, hackers, spammers, fishing-schemes). This array of programmable safety
devices, part of the paradigm of suburban living in the United States since the 1980s, is worth
recognizing because some of it preceded and then extended the safety regime surrounding personal
computing, which developed as a central (but certainly not the only) way of enacting the smart
household.
23 The makeover of one family's house installed a security system by Safeguard; the makeover of
another family's house installed security systems by Silent Knight and Home Control Systems.
24 See, for instance, Surveillance, Closed-circuit Television, and Social Control, ed. Clive Norris,
Jade Moran, and Gary Armstrong (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1998).
25 James Hay and Jeremy Packer, "Crossing the Media(-n): Auto-mobility, the Transported Self, and
Technologies of Freedom," in Media Space, ed. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy (New York and
London: Routledge, 2004).
26 Much has been made of the contradiction between the Bush administration's emphasis upon
"limiting government" and its institution of an ambitious federal agency such as the Department of
Homeland Security, an agency that serves as a ridgepole for all its other policies and programs. The
department is unlike many other and previous federal agencies, however, in that its role has, from the
start, been mostly about facilitating and coordinating "do-it-yourself' security - providing

informational resources and links for citizens to learn for themselves how to apply themselves as
managers of their own welfare and security. The current federalism that conceives of the solution to
centralized and "big" government as the localization, privatization, and personalization of welfare's
administration, requires a network such as the TV-Web nexus through which the population most
engaged with this network can maximize their self-sufficiency. In this respect, there is nothing
particularly paradoxical about the enormity of the scope of a Homeland Security - about the
reinvention of government through a new federal bureau and bureaucracy - and the survival (indeed
the deepening) of the requirement that government be a "public-private partnership" and that citizens
look after their own welfare and security. The stridency of the libertarian opposition to a nanny state
(and nanny culture), i.e., of a state-govermnent that is constantly surveilling, correcting, and limiting
personal conduct and freedoms, is more uneasy about a federal "bailout" of Hurricane Katrina
victims, which has yet to materialize, than it is about the do-it-yourself plans for securing a "home
land." See James Hay and Mark Andrejevic, Homeland Insecurities, special issues of Cultural
Studies, July-Sept., 2006.
27 As Hay has noted, the formation of a Homeland Defense continues a longstanding practice in the
United States of a primarily privatized and personalized "civil defense," even though the Department
of Homeland Defense developed through a different governmental rationality about self-defense, and
through a different regime of privatized and personalized security programs, than before the 1980s.
See James Hay, "Designing Homes to be the First Line of Defense," Cultural Studies, 20:4-5 (2006),
pp. 349-77.
Notes to Chapter 5

1 The household or neighborhood that TV enacts is a fiction (a representation on TV), but one that has
a relation to physical places where TV's fictional neighborhoods are watched and circulate. And this
formation (constitution) of TV neighborhoods occurs through a mode of production. The most common
critical perspective about media (by TV criticism and political economists) has been about how
media make meaning and/or money through a "mode of production." Supernanny or the other programs
considered in this chapter are different from older TV series where neighborhoods and households
were constructed on Hollywood sets. That these recent households and neighborhoods are not
produced on a Hollywood set and are not populated by professional actors situates them within a
different mode of production than earlier TV in the United States.
2 The drafters of the US Constitution used the constitutions of regional territories and "states" as
templates for a national constitution, and federalism (a governmental arrangement emphasizing the
sovereignty/rights of regional and local constitutions under government by the nation-state) has been
an ongoing dimension of liberalism. The legislative and judicial activism supporting federalism in the
United States since the late 1970s has been particularly integral to projects for "reinventing
government" and thus is of interest in this book.
3 Just as state government is rationalized through and administers formal laws for citizens,
govermnentalities also are constituted around formal and informal rules and guidelines that are
intended not only to authorize and sanction, but also to make rational and fair, specific forns of

association, participation, and membership. These various, localized, private and personal, formal
and informal ways that liberal government is constituted (and reconstituted or reinvented through
daily life) comprise afield ofgovernment - the many reasons/rationalities of its administration in daily
life.
4 As noted in the Introduction, this is a tenn recently developed by Tony Bennett, "Civic Laboratories:
Museums, Cultural Objecthood and the Governance of the Social," Cultural Studies, 19:5 (2005).
Also, as explained in the Introduction, a "civil society" is not only an aggregate of private,
"nongovernmental" institutions and associations administering to different social and life needs; civil
society is also an array of private and self-directed rules and techniques through which we enter into
our own government - the resources of self-regulation that operate through society and that
collectively become the means to individual empowerment and civility. A civil society (in both
senses) is thus the primary objective, resource, and terrain of liberal government.
5 Consider, for instance, how the formation of TV's domestic comedy during the 1950s offered sets of
instructions about the suburban household and neighborhood.
6 The history of TV programs on PBS, such as Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and Sesame Street, are
examples of how TV program development as citizen education (as constituting the rules of
neighborliness) was driven and supported as an initiative of state government (see Laurie Ouellette,
Viewers Like You? How Public TV Failed the People, New York: Columbia University Press,
2002), though the history of commercial TV programming has itself been a response to government
policy and to reasonings about the role of government and about the role of TV within public and
private techniques of citizen education (see Introduction). The current stage of TV examined in this
book has developed out of prior public and commercial TV practices of citizen education.
7 They included the Crenshaws (whom the series' publicity described as a devout Christian and
African-American couple), the Eckhardts (a Native American and Caucasian couple whose
spirituality was described as "pagan"), the Gonzalezes (a loud and "boisterous" Hispanic family), the
Lees (a Korean-American family that runs a sushi restaurant), the Morgans (a Caucasian family whose
mother has a "secret," which the series reveals is "stripping"), the Sheets (a Caucasian family whose
bodies are covered in tattoos and piercings), and the Wrights (a Caucasian lesbian couple who have
adopted an African-American boy).
8 The legal action threatened by GLAAD differed from the action threatened by the NFHA in that it
pertained mostly to televisual representations of discriminatory practices (and, according to this
rationale, TV's discriminatory practices). GLAAD's web site proudly lists various actions that it
successfully brought against various instances of media/companies' gender and sexual discrimination
(e.g., convincing the New York Times to adopt the teen "gay" in their editorial section and to include
same-sex marriage notices in its wedding announcement section, mobilizing viewers of the TV series
Ellen to "Let Ellen Out," and campaigning against Eminem's and other recording artists' "anti-gay"
lyrics). When GLAAD announced its concern about Welcome to the Neighborhood (soon after the
program's production was announced by ABC), the series' producers agreed to allow Damon

Romline, the media director for GLAAD, to view several episodes in order to decide whether the
series' representation of a transformation by the homeowners satisfied GLAAD's misgivings about the
game's rules and about the sentiments expressed in the first episode by certain homeowners about the
alternative lifestyles and families cast as contestants.
9 The Better Community "brand" (as ABC/Disney calls it) promotes the corporation's role in
"partnerships," which include Habitat for Humanity, the Points of Light Foundation's Volunteer Center
National Network, the National Center for Healthy Housing, and the Council for Better Business
Bureaus. For more on this see Chapter 1.
10 See, for instance, Stephanie McCrummen, "Redefining Property Values," Washington Post, Apr.
16, 2006, p. Al, which discusses marketing research and strategies for the Ladera Ranch subdivision.
Brooke Warrick, from Ladera's marketing firm, "American Lives," notes that "Neighboring is one of
the biggest concepts in America. People want connections. And as good developers, we should
recognize what it means to create community." The article identifies Warrick as one of many
marketers of residential developments who has turned the strategies of media market research (used
to identify the taste cultures, lifestyle clusters, and "values subcultures") into strategies for identifying
values that might design a more neighborly neighborhood.
11 See Anna McCarthy, "Stanley Milgram, Allen Funt, and Me: Postwar Social Science and the First
Wave of Reality TV," in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, ed. Susan Murray and Laurie
Ouellette (New York: New York University Press, 2004).
While acknowledging that the social-scientific aspiration of commercial TV programs has not figured
prominently in histories of US TV (arguably because of TV criticism's bias toward understanding TV
culture through fictional, narrative TV - an analysis that has emphasized questions of style, identity,
and meaning rather than technical knowledge and self-formation), TV's design of programs as socialscientific experiments are part of an equally long history of social-scientific research about TV's
effects on audiences.
12 In the finale of the spring, 2005 season of Survivor, contestants were rewarded with toothpaste
and mouthwash - as product placement - for having completed certain tasks successfully.
13 Chantal Mouffe discusses a similar paradox which she attributes to German political theorist Carl
Schmitt's writing about democracy: "No doubt there is an opposition between the liberal 'grammar' of
equality, which postulates universality and reference to `humanity', and the practice of democratic
equality, which requires the political moment of discrimination between `us' and `them'." Mouffe
contends that Schmitt was wrong to have presented this conflict as a contradiction "that is bound to
lead liberal democracy to self-destruction" (Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, London and New
York: Verso, 1999, p. 44). We would add that the vein of reality TV discussed in this section in fact
involves ritual demonstrations of this paradox's importance to a current reasoning about liberal
government.
14 For an explanation of "communities of practice," see Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, &

William Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide to Managing Knowledge (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
15 This dynamic also was foregrounded when Trump appeared with current and former contestants on
the QVC network to sell a DVD from the first season along with his latest advice book. Contestants
repeatedly stated how much they had learned from their participation on the show as a way of
supporting the premise of a link between Trump's books and the series DVD.
16 The Apprentice became one of the most widely watched TV programs in 2004-5, the height of the
Bush-Cheney administration's campaign to privatize and personalize Social Security. For more on the
connection between reality TV and the push to "overhaul" Social Security, see James Hay,
"`Overhaulin' TV and Government: Thoughts on the Political Campaign to Pimp Your Ride," Flow,
1:9 (2005).
17 Currently, The Contender's future is in doubt. It is being rerun on ESPN (a sports network). As
much as the series is an experiment and game in upward social mobility (like The Apprentice), its
lack of traction in the current governmental rationality may be its emphasis on alliances and group
governance among contestants who represent a population that is entirely male and predominantly an
economic underclass and/or racial minority.
18 Observations are based upon the manuals and rights posted on ABC's web site for Wife Swap for
broadcasts during the spring of 2006.
19 The series was the highest rated reality TV series on a basic cable network (F/X) since MTV's
The Osbornes.
20 Much of the program's premiere episode in 2006 interspersed scenes of the subjects' physical
transformation by professional makeup technicians and scenes of the subjects' confessions to one
another about how they felt to embody racial difference and hybridity (as bodies that were alternately
black/white) and to play by the rules for black and white.
21 While the two families were differentiated racially by the program's title, and while the two
families described themselves as "average" black and white families, blogs, newspapers, and
magazines revealed that Bruno Marcotulli was the boyfriend/partner of Carmen Wurgel and not the
biological father of her daughter, Rose, in the family identified as the Marcotullis.
22 This retro-trend is most formalized in the community of professional architects and city planners
who describe themselves as New Urbanists. For more on the New Urbanism's rationale about the
destructive effects of suburbanization, see The Charter for New Urbanism (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1999).
23 See the Chamber of Commerce web sites for images of these towns and their events.
Notes to Chapter 6

1 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York
University Press, 2006).
2 Ibid., p. 249.
3 Ibid., p. 248.
4 John Hartley, The Uses of Television (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
5 Ibid., p. 181.
6 Ibid., p. 186.
7 Ibid., p. 228.
8 Ibid., p. 178.
9 Ibid., p. 234.
10 Jeffrey Minson, Questions of Conduct: Sexual Harassment, Citizenship, and Government (London:
Macmillan, 1993).
11 Hartley, Uses of Television.
12 This is potentially one implication of Williams's statement above about the need for an analysis
that does not resolve but clarifies the variety of democracies - and, we would add, the relative
interplay and interdependence among the informal technical procedures of association, membership,
and participation.
13 As noted in Chapter 5, Chantal Mouffe's The Democratic Paradox (by way of Carl Schmidt) offers
one way of thinking about the relation between membership and agency.
14 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford
University Press, [1976] 1985).
15 Gregor McClennan, "Democracy," in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and
Society, ed. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris (New York and London:
Blackwell, 2005).
16 The widespread use of the remote control for the TV monitor and VCR during the 1980s was part
of a widespread reliance upon remote-control devices and programmable technologies in US
households. James Hay, "Unaided Virtues: The (Neo-)Liberalization of the Domestic Sphere and the
New Architecture of Community," in Foucault, Cultural Studies, Governmentality, ed. Jack Bratich,
Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003).
17 Center for Digital Democracy, "TV that Watches You," June, 2001.

18 Mark Andrejevic, Reality TV: The Work ofBeing Watched (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,
2003).
19 American Idol is, in this respect, an example of the kind of makeover program discussed in
Chapter 2, as contestants are not only judged but advised (often in very technical musical terms) about
why their performance failed or how it could be improved.
20 See, for instance, The New York Times, May 12, 2006.
21 For instance, the organization and management of corporations as "communities of practice"
(discussed in Chapter 5 in relation to The Apprentice) has become a model for efforts to reinvent the
federal government's administrative bureaucracy. For one perspective on this convergence of private
and public models of management, see James Hay, "The New Techno-Communitarianism and
Residual Logics of Mediation," in Residual Media, ed. Charles Acland (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007).
22 According to the Rock-the Vote Action Center web site. The fuller rationale for Rock the Vote
casts voting as a civic responsibility for youth and casts youth as empowered through this civic
responsibility:
Rock the Vote: Political power for young people.
Rock the Vote is a non-profit, non-partisan organization, founded in 1990 in response to a wave of
attacks on freedom of speech and artistic expression.
Rock the Vote engages youth in the political process by incorporating the entertainment community
and youth culture into its activities. From actors to musicians, comedians to athletes, Rock the Vote
harnesses cutting-edge trends and pop culture to make political participation cool.
Rock the Vote mobilizes young people to create positive social and political change in their lives and
communities. The goal of Rock the Vote's media campaigns and street team activities is to increase
youth voter turnout. Rock the Vote coordinates voter registration drives, get-out-thevote events, and
voter education efforts, all with the intention of ensuring that young people take advantage of their
right to vote.
Rock the Vote's work doesn't end when the polls close. We empower young people to create change
in their communities and take action on the issues they care about. Regardless of whether youth are
signing petitions, running for office, contacting their elected officials, or taking up a sign in protest,
they are all rocking the vote.
23 In Dr. Phil's interview with George and Laura Bush, he begins by stating:
I'm really committed to putting family back in America. I think it's what you have put in the White
House. I think it's what we need to put back in America, and I'm devoting so much of my third season
to family first, what I call family first, and putting it back together. In preparation for a book that I've

done, I've conducted a survey of 20,000 parents and asked them all the questions I could about
parenting. I was shocked at one thing: Forty percent of them said, "If I knew then what I know now, I
probably wouldn't have started a family."
Later in the interview, Bush discusses the "role of government" as protecting the family and household
from unwanted "cultural influence" - a reference to the intrusion of the "wrong" kind of media into the
home. Bush's solution is less one of intrusion by government than one of providing families the
technologies to secure their own households.
24 Dr. Phil taped three specials titled "Hurricane Katrina: The Aftermath," "Hurricane Katrina:
Rescuing the Rescuers," and "Hurricane Katrina: Rebuilding Lives" - all broadcast in the fall of
2005.
25 See Laurie Ouellette, "`Take Responsibility for Youself: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen,"
in Reality TV: Rernaking Television Culture, ed. Susan Murray and Laurie Ouellette (New York:
New York University Press, 2004).
26 Al Iraqiya was formed and financed by a CIA contractor, Science Applications International
Corporation, in the first months after the US-led invasion of Iraq.
27 A bloody irony of the televisual mediation of "justice" by Iraqi citizens in the wake of Al Iraqiya's
effort to export US-style reality TV to Iraq (as part of the US campaign to bring liberal government
through the so-called Operation Iraqi Freedom) has been the rapidly increasing availability in the
marketplaces of some Iraqi cities of home-made videos made by snipers felling US soldiers.
28 "Howard Stern Tries to Kill `American Idol' with Kindness for a Weak Link," New York Times,
Mar. 31, 2007.
29 The funds from this campaign were purportedly to go to the newly formed Charity Projects
Entertainment Fund for distribution to groups such as America's Second Harvest: The Nation's Food
Bank Network, Boys and Girls Clubs of America, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and
Malaria. Rock star-activist Bono promoted his initiative, "ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty
History," through the American Idol campaign.
30 Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 259.
31 Phil C. McGraw, Ph.D., "Life is Managed, It is Not Cured," in Life Strategies: Doing What Works
Well, Doing What Matters (New York: Hyperion, 1999).

Index